March — Plowing at Lusignan

The story

Peasants plow, sow, and prune a vineyard in the foreground while, behind them, the turreted silhouette of the Château de Lusignan rises against the sky — a castle bound up in the legend of the fairy Mélusine, said to circle its towers as a winged serpent whenever a lord of the house was about to die. The Limbourg brothers give the labor of the land equal weight with the aristocratic legend looming over it: two versions of the same French landscape, myth and agriculture sharing a single horizon. The zodiac lunette turns from Pisces to Aries, spring's true beginning. Look for the careful differentiation of tasks across the field — sowing, harrowing, pruning — a small encyclopedia of March husbandry rendered in miniature.