The Collection
Every piece is a faithful, museum-grade reproduction of a public-domain masterwork, printed on archival stock and named to its source.
Insular & Celtic
Knotwork, spiral, and the beast that becomes a letter.
The Chi Rho Monogram
Folio 34r — the most celebrated page in Western calligraphy.
The Virgin and Child
Folio 7v — the earliest surviving Madonna in a Western manuscript.
The Four Evangelist Symbols
Folio 27v — man, lion, calf, and eagle, prefacing Matthew.
The Eight-Circle Cross
Folio 33r — the only carpet page of its kind in the manuscript.
The Temptation of Christ
Folio 202v — Satan, the Temple, and a crowd of witnesses.
The Matthew Cross-Carpet Page
Folio 26v — a Latin cross afloat in a field of interlace.
Incipit to Matthew
Folio 27r — "Liber generationis Jesu Christi," illuminated into ornament.
The Calendar
A year in gold — the Limbourg brothers' Labors of the Months.
January — The Duke's New Year
The calendar's famous frontispiece: Jean de Berry at his own feast table.
February — The Peasants' Hearth
A snow-covered farmyard, and the coldest, tenderest scene in the calendar.
March — Plowing at Lusignan
Sowers and shepherds beneath a fairy-tale castle on the horizon.
April — The Betrothal
A ring exchanged before the Château de Dourdan, in the year's first green.
May — The Green Ride
A cavalcade of nobles in may-green, riding out to welcome the spring.
June — Haymaking Before the Sainte-Chapelle
Peasants scythe hay in the shadow of Paris's royal palace.
July — Shearing and Harvest at Poitiers
Sheep-shearers and reapers work beneath the Duke's own château.
September — The Grape Harvest at Saumur
Pickers fill baskets before one of the era's most fantastical castles.
October — Sowing Before the Louvre
A scarecrow-archer guards the seed as Paris's old fortress looms.
November — Gathering Acorns
A swineherd knocks acorns down for his pigs in an autumn wood.
December — The Boar Hunt at Vincennes
Hounds bring down a boar in the Duke's own royal forest.
August — The Falconry Party
Nobles ride to hawk before the Château d'Étampes, harvest and hounds all around them.
The Anatomical Man
Folio 14v — the body mapped onto the zodiac, front and back.
The Garden of Eden
Folio 25v — Temptation, Fall, and Expulsion in a single walled garden.
The Sacred Page
Where the text itself becomes an icon.
Christ Enthroned
Folio 32v — the Book of Kells' full-page portrait of Christ in majesty.
The Gathering of the Manna
Folio 137v — the Israelites in the wilderness, in jewel-box Dutch color.
A Plate from the Cloisters Apocalypse
One of 72 miniatures illustrating the Book of Revelation in Gothic Normandy.
The Beatus Vir Initial
"Beatus vir qui non abiit..." — King David inside the Psalter's grandest letter.
Bestiary & Marginalia
The beasts in the margins — pious, moralizing, and gloriously strange.
The Pelican in Her Piety
A mother bird wounds her own breast to feed her young with her blood.
The Phoenix
The bird that builds its own pyre and rises from the ash.
The Lion, King of Beasts
Two intertwined legends on one gold-ground folio — the roar that revives, the tail that erases the trail.
The Whale Mistaken for an Island
Sailors moor on its back mistaking it for land — until it dives.
The Griffin, Guardian of Gold
Lion below, eagle above — a hoarder of northern gold, and no coward when confronted.
The Panther's Sweet Breath
Its breath alone draws every beast in the forest to follow — save one.
The Caladrius
A bird that reads a sickbed with a glance, and carries the illness into the sun.
The Fox Who Feigned Death
Feigns death, lures the hungry birds close, and eats them instead.
The Beaver's Sacrifice
Self-mutilation as the price of escape — chastity's strangest medieval mascot.
A Gorleston Psalter Drollery
Folio 123r — the East Anglian margin at its most inventively strange.
Threshing at Harvest — The Luttrell Psalter
Folio 74v — the most detailed record of English rural labor to survive its century.