Figure with Scythe, Illuminated Initials "KL" or "BV" recto, and Fish with Lobster Claws, verso, from a Psalter or Book of Hours

Anonymous Benedictine Monk/Scribe · 1275/1325

Medium

Manuscript cutting with decorations in tempera and gold leaf, and with inscriptions in dark brown, red and blue ink, ruled in dark brown ink, on vellum

Original size

10.2 × 6.5 cm (4 1/16 × 2 9/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Medieval

This small fragment of medieval manuscript illumination holds an entire world within its margins — a cloaked figure wielding a scythe on one side, and a fantastical fish adorned with lobster claws on the other. Created by an anonymous Benedictine monk or scribe sometime between 1275 and 1325, the cutting exemplifies the Gothic illumination tradition at its most playful and precise. Working with tempera pigments and burnished gold leaf on calfskin vellum, monastic artists of this period moved freely between devotional seriousness and a genuine fondness for creatures both real and invented. The inhabited initials — rendered in deep crimson, cobalt blue, and dark brown ink — display the meticulous ruling and layered brushwork that defined the great northern European scriptoria. Pages like this were frequently cut from intact manuscripts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when book-breaking was common practice and individual illuminated leaves were sold as collectibles — which is how many medieval cuttings ended up in museum collections rather than bound volumes. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the delicacy of tempera and gold into a medium built to endure, preserving the warmth of the original palette and the quiet authority of each carefully drawn line — bringing a piece of monastic craft that once lived in a single prayer book into homes where it can be properly seen.