Duc de Berry was conceived as an alt through which to launch Scrapbook Illuminations, an NFT project formally structured after a page from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The fifteenth-century manuscript was produced within a workshop system - most notably by the Limbourg brothers - under aristocratic patronage. The Duc was the commissioner, not the artist. His name endures because he organised and financed a distributed process of production. The manuscript itself was a Book of Hours, made for his personal devotional use, structured around the rhythms of prayer. It was both intimate object and instrument of status.
@ducdeberrry is a reconfiguration. In this practice, the division between patron and maker is unstable. I do not simply prompt Stable Diffusion. I train LoRAs on my own paintings, construct and edit datasets, and determine which outputs persist. The paintings used for training are produced with that process in mind. Compositional density, colour relationships, repetition of motifs, and surface texture are shaped by prior observation of how diffusion models abstract and exaggerate visual information.
Model outputs in turn expose structural tendencies within the source material - flattened depth, pattern fixation, amplified contrast, etc - which inform subsequent paintings. The relationship is iterative rather than linear. Painting and model training operate as a feedback system.
Within this framework, “Duc de Berry” names a procedural role rather than a fictional identity. It designates the act of structuring production: defining parameters, initiating a series, overseeing training, and determining circulation. Unlike the historical patron, however, this role is not external to aesthetic labour. The same practice establishes the system and produces the material on which it operates.
Authorship is therefore redistributed rather than dissolved. Production, transformation, and selection are distinct but interdependent phases. The medieval workshop separated patronage from execution; here those functions are consolidated within a hybrid process spanning paint and computation.
Where the original manuscript was commissioned for the use and possession of a single aristocratic patron, Scrapbook Illuminations circulates as an NFT across multiple holders. Ownership is no longer singular, but distributed. The anticipated audience - largely artists themselves - also informs the work’s formation. The project is shaped in dialogue with that community: their visual literacy, their familiarity with AI systems, their position within the same technical and aesthetic field. In this sense, the work is produced partly because of them and partly for them.
Those who collect it do not merely purchase it; their mint functions as a form of patronage within the system that produces and sustains the work. The commissioning function shifts from an individual sovereign figure to a networked group whose attention, participation, and acquisition sustain the series. Duc de Berry therefore does not signify ownership in this context. It names a method of organising image production in which commissioning, making, training, and circulation are structurally intertwined, and in which the audience itself occupies a patronal role.