Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg

• Illustration — The Fool Hath said in his heart, There is no God, folio 83v The illustrations are characterised by unusually skilled handling of line, silhouette, and the realistic modelling of the figures. It begins ordinarily enough with a calendar showing traditional scenes of farm labourers and zodiac signs. The main body of the book consists of illustrations of the Psalms. The final pages contain unusual miniatures illustrating prayers, including folio 315, a representation of Divine Love Enthroned. The iconographical elements and themes are unusually dark, specific, and thought to have originated at the request of Jutta, who died thereafter. • Illustration — Crucifixion A crucifixion scene shows two figures kneeling before the crucified Christ. He lays his hands directly on His wounds, described in the accompanying text. In this way, he is depicted as a self-sacrificing God and is painted in a very naturalistic, human manner. The Psalter is thus dated to just before her death in 1349, a period when the Black Death was beginning to spread across Europe. The passages in the manuscript depict the suffering caused by this new plague, and have been described as of "incredible intensity". The most acclaimed two leaves illustrate the Two Fools and the Three Living and the Three Dead, an allegory of transience and a reminder to the viewer of their mortality. This double miniature is one of the first such allegories to appear in northern European art, and seems influenced by the French poets Baudouin de Condé and Nicolas de Margival. The first page depicts three young courtiers who happen across a cemetery, to find three corpses at varying degrees of decomposition. The dead mock the young men's superficial outlook, and in what was to become a classic motif of Memento mori, the accompanying text urges reflection by asking "What you are, we once were; what we are, you will be." The page margins contain at least two hundred birds of around forty species, mostly depicted three-eighths of an inch or less in size. Most were well and minutely described from life and identifiable; the leaves feature miniature depictions sparrows, finches, larks, among others; some depictions are either fanciful or too badly drawn or indistinct to be believed as from life. The treatment of the birds is so consistent it has been suggested that they were designed by a single hand, although with the weaker examples, he had perhaps been accompanied by a less familiar assistant. The page illustrating Psalm 53, The Fool Hath said in his heart, There is no God, shows a man drinking from a chalice, a typical attribute of the fool, signifying drunkenness. He is held back by another man who holds his long hood and beats him. This second character probably comes from the tradition of depicting the fool as a yokel or madman clutching a cudgel. The first fool has variously been identified as a drunkard, a monk, and Archbishop Baldwin of Luxembourg. A contemporary viewer would have likely recognised him as a Jew. Both men contain elements of the grotesque, and are executed in grisaille against a deep blue background. The bas-de-page contains two lions gnawing at the Bonne of Luxembourg coat-of-arms. • Illustration — The Three Living and the Three Dead, folio 322r • Illustration — Folio • Illustration — Folio