A finely illuminated leaf from what must once have been a luxurious Book of Hours. Each calendar month is illuminated by a delightful miniature at the head of the page showing the appropriate labour and sign of the zodiac, as well as having an illuminated panel border to the side of the text and illuminated initials and lettering in gold, blue and red with a saint recorded for every day.
In this case, the painting of a naked man and woman embracing as the sign for Gemini, as John Harthan notes, was one of the few places in a Book of Hours, apart from pictures of St. Sebastian and Bathsheba in her bath, where artists could safely give their patrons a mild erotic frisson by portraying nudity. “Artists apparently had complete freedom in how they depicted the occupations and signs of the zodiac. In routine Books of Hours the treatment of these subjects is conventional or perfunctory; but in the more costly examples artists had scope for landscape painting and naturalistic observation. The zodiacal signs provided them with an opportunity for figure painting and for varied animal and fish designs. The pictures of the occupations of the months contain material of the greatest interest for students of social history, costume and agriculture. In them can be found illustrations of domestic interiors, agricultural implements, methods of pruning, ploughing, reaping, shearing sheep, wine-making and baking, while the courtly scenes show how the leisured class disported themselves in hawking, hunting, boating and dalliance in gardens dressed in their finest clothes. Nor do the seasonal changes go unrecorded: wintry scenes in January and February, trees broken by the frost being pruned in March, the springtime flowers in their green verdure, and the brown leaves on the trees in autumn.” (John Harthan, Books of Hours, 1977, pp. 24-26).
