3-037-729 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Gathering Twigs; Calendar Miniature from a Book of Hours, about 1550. Two Flemish peasants gather sticks into bundles before a landscape of rolling hills, cottages, and a river. The trees have lost their leaves, the sky is overcast, and the men are warmly dressed; the activity of clearing away dead wood was traditionally a wintertime activity. This small cutting from the lower border of a manuscript page is one of a pair of miniatures back-to-back on a single leaf, originally serving as an illustration in the calendar section of a book of hours. The miniatures appeared at the bottom of two calendar pages that listed church holidays. Each page was devoted to a particular month, and each miniature depicts an activity associated with the month. In these miniatures, Bening showed that landscape backgrounds, with their distinctive weather conditions, could be even more evocative of a particular month than the activities themselves. Despite their small size, the scenes are as ambitious in scope and composition as independent paintings of considerably larger dimensions. Admiring these scenes as independent paintings, a previous owner of the cutting framed it and hung it on the wall like any other landscape painted on canvas or wood.