The Master of Catherine of Cleves, “Mouth of Hell” from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (c. 1440), courtesy The Morgan Museum & Library

Given the emphasis on performance and conceptual work in New York museums last season, not to mention the frenzy generated by the overlapping of the Whitney Biennial with the official and unofficial contemporary art elements of the recent art fairs, it’s easy to assume that, these days, only new-minted “cultural production” commands attention in this city. Yet art made almost six centuries ago stars in some of this spring’s most compelling exhibitions—a trio of remarkable, more or less concurrent, shows: “The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry” and “The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves” at the Morgan Library Museum.[1] (All were accompanied by informative, beautifully produced catalogues). For inventiveness, freshness, and sheer emotional potency, the works in these exhibitions—intimate manuscript illuminations and modest funerary figures, all from the first half of the fifteenth century—more than hold their own against the most raucous, self-aware “alternative media” of the present day.

Of course, these small-scale fifteenth-century paintings and sculptures were intended for private contemplation and devotion, unlike the majority of today’s canny efforts, which are not only designed for