February — The Peasants' Hearth

The story

Winter rendered with startling frankness: inside a wattle farmhouse, two peasants lift their robes to warm themselves directly at an open fire, while outside, snow blankets a farmyard of beehives, a sheepfold, and a woodcutter making his way to market with a laden donkey. Breath is nearly visible in the cold blue air. This is among the earliest convincing snowscapes in Western painting, and the earliest to place ordinary rural labor — not saints, not nobility — at the emotional center of a full-page miniature. The zodiac lunette above pairs Aquarius and Pisces. Art historians have long prized this folio precisely because it has almost no symbolic agenda: it simply observes how the poor survived a Burgundian winter, with a sympathy unusual for its century.