Simon Bening’s Golf Book (May, fol. 22v) presents a vibrant Renaissance May Day scene, blending aristocratic leisure on the river with richly detailed Flemish city and countryside landscapes.
Simon Bening’s April
Simon Bening’s April miniature from the Golf Book depicts an elegant Renaissance courtship in a lush garden, where richly dressed lovers, lively figures, and refined details celebrate spring, love, and aristocratic life.
Simon Bening’s March
Simon Bening’s Golf Book (March, f.20v) presents a refined medieval garden scene where aristocratic authority, labour, and daily life intersect, offering insight into monastic horticulture and medicinal plant traditions.
Simon Bening’s February
Simon Bening’s February miniature depicts a lavish manor feast, where aristocrats, musicians, and servants gather around firelight and rich furnishings, revealing the social ritual, luxury, and domestic life of late medieval nobility.
Simon Bening’s January
Books of Hours were popular medieval prayer books designed for lay devotion, structured around daily prayers and richly illustrated calendars marking saints’ days, “red letter days,” and feast days in gold and red for spiritual reflection and timekeeping.
The Labours of the Months: December
Folgore da San Gimignano’s December sonnet, translated by Rossetti, introduces the “Labours of the Months” theme, linking medieval rural work, seasonal cycles, and moral reflection through vivid poetic imagery.
The Labours of the Months: November
The Venetian November panel from the National Gallery’s “Labours of the Months” cycle replaces agrarian toil with a courtly hunt, depicting a young huntsman with hounds and falcon in a vividly colored, aristocratic landscape.
The Labours of the Months: October
Part of a Venetian ‘Labours of the Months’ series, this small painting depicts seasonal rural life with vivid colours, linking peasant work, nature’s cycles, and social order in a decorative, symbolic composition.
The Labours of the Months: September
A unknown Venetian artist’s September — a man pressing grapes beneath a vine — forms part of a vivid Renaissance painted door series depicting the traditional twelve Labours of the Months.
The Labours of the Months: August
Twelve tiny Venetian panels — vivid with ultramarine skies, vermilion clothing, and lush landscapes — capture the peasant Labours of the Months with charming decorative simplicity, once adorning a Renaissance palazzo’s doors.