The Anatomical Man
Folio 14v — the body mapped onto the zodiac, front and back.
- Work
- Book of Hours (calendar cycle)
- Artist / creator
- The Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Paul & Jean de Limbourg); later folios completed by Jean Colombe
- Origin & date
- Franco-Flemish, c. 1412–1416 (later miniatures c. 1485–1489)
- Held by
- Musée Condé, Chantilly
Format
The full-resolution color-managed file — yours to print, study, and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan's resolution supports sizes up to 8x10 cleanly.
Size
$24.00
The story
A single nude figure appears twice, front-facing and turned away, standing inside a mandorla of gold stars, surrounded by the twelve zodiac signs and lines connecting each sign to the body part medieval medicine believed it governed — Aries to the head, Pisces to the feet, and so on through the whole anatomy. This diagram, known as melothesia, was a genuinely functional medical tool: physicians consulted the zodiac before bleeding or treating a given part of the body, avoiding a sign's "ruled" organ while it held astrological dominance. It is the most purely scientific page the Limbourg workshop ever produced, standing apart from the calendar's pastoral and courtly scenes as a window into how the medieval mind fused astronomy, medicine, and theology into a single coherent, gold-lit system.
About this reproduction
- Faithful reproduction of a public-domain work, sourced from Musée Condé, Chantilly’s open-access release.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan.
- Available as a Gold-Foil Premium Edition — a metallic accent print evoking the illuminator’s gold, for a piece from one of the tradition’s luminous, gilded manuscripts.
- Ships in 5–8 business days; satisfaction guaranteed.
See it framed
Room
Frame
Shown as a 8x10″ archival print, true to the piece's own proportions, on a real photographed wall.
From The Calendar
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.