The Trinity and Saints in Paradise, or La Cour Céleste from a volume of "La Cité de Dieu" by St Augustine

Egregius Pictor Franciscus · mid–15th century

Medium

Tempera and gold leaf on vellum, laid down on wood panel

Original size

17.8 × 22.2 cm (7 1/16 × 8 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

A radiant vision of the heavenly court, this mid-15th-century illumination presents the Trinity enthroned amid ranks of saints and angels in the gilded paradise Augustine described in his great theological work, *De Civitate Dei*. The anonymous master known as Egregius Pictor Franciscus — the epithet meaning simply "the distinguished painter Franciscus" — worked in the refined Franco-Flemish tradition of manuscript illumination, layering translucent tempera over vellum and burnishing gold leaf to achieve the luminous, jewel-like depth that distinguishes the finest books of hours and devotional manuscripts of the period. His figures are precise and hieratic, arranged with the calm authority of a composer who understood that heavenly order was itself a form of beauty. Augustine's *City of God*, one of the most copied texts of the medieval world, inspired some of the era's most ambitious illumination programmes, and this celestial court scene ranks among the most visually complete surviving examples of its kind. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the original's delicate tonality and gilt radiance onto canvas with careful attention to its spatial depth and the warm ochres and lapis blues that give the composition its otherworldly serenity.