Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry — commissioned by John, Duke of Berry, and painted primarily by the three Limbourg Brothers (Pol, Herman, and Jean) between approximately 1412 and 1416, then completed after their deaths by other masters — is the most celebrated illuminated manuscript in existence, and arguably the greatest single artifact of medieval European art. Its calendar pages alone constitute a revolution: for the first time in Western art, the months of the year are depicted as real landscapes with real peasants doing real seasonal work, under real skies painted with the astronomical precision of people who had studied the heavens. The devotional imagery that accompanies the calendar — the Hours of the Virgin, the Office of the Dead, the prayers for each canonical hour — represents the full spiritual universe of late medieval Christendom, compressed into a book small enough to hold in both hands. The Anatomical Man (Zodiac Man) — the human body mapped ...