Nix et Glacies: The Oldest Snowball Fight in European Art

A medical handbook is not where you look for a joke. Around 1390 a workshop in Lombardy was copying and illustrating one, and when it reached the entry for snow and ice the painter did something that still stops people six hundred years later: he painted two young people throwing snowballs at each other.

The book is the Tacuinum sanitatis, the Latin form of the Taqwīm al-ṣiḥḥa — the Tables of Health — written by the Baghdad physician Ibn Buṭlān, who died about 1066. Ibn Buṭlān's idea was administrative rather than literary. Everything in the world that can touch the body gets one entry, and every entry is built the same way: its nature, which kind to choose, what it helps, what it harms, how to cancel the harm, and what it produces. Bread. Wind. Cheese. Sleep. Snow.

Translated in southern Italy in the thirteenth century, the text travelled north and, at the end of the fourteenth, ran into a fashion for illustrated luxury copies in Lombardy — made for the Visconti court and the families around it. In those manuscripts each entry gets a painting: not a diagram, but a scene, with people in it, doing the thing. The result is the closest we have to a photograph album of late-medieval daily life. Someone picks quinces. Someone salts meat. Someone sells fish.

Nix et glacies

Folio 96 verso carries the rubric Nix et glacies — snow and ice — and the picture above it does not illustrate a doctrine. It illustrates weather.

A young man in red hose is caught mid-turn on the frozen water, one hand raised, half laughing, half fending off. A young woman in blue has a snowball already raised in her right hand and a second one held ready in her left. Behind them the brown rock of the mountains stands under fresh snow. Below their feet is the ice they are standing on, painted as a pale blue-grey sheet.

It is among the earliest surviving depictions of a snowball fight in European art. That matters less as a record than as a change of subject. Medieval winter, in most pictures, is work: the pig is slaughtered, the wood is carried, the old man warms his feet at the fire. Here nobody is working. Two people are playing, in the snow, because there is snow.

The Latin beneath the frame is business as usual — the six rubrics, in red and brown, telling the reader that snow-water is best when it comes from clean fresh snow, that it improves digestion, that it harms the chest, and that the harm is cancelled by drinking it in moderation. The painter had that to illustrate. He painted a snowball fight instead.

What we printed, and what we left alone

The illuminator drew a framing line around his picture. That line is the author's own statement about where the picture begins and ends, and it is the only defensible place to cut. So the mug takes the miniature exactly to that line, with a little parchment left showing on every side — and stops.

Nothing inside it was retouched. Nothing was added, nothing removed, nothing invented. The red heading Nix et glacies stays where he wrote it, at the foot of the picture. The six paragraphs of Latin lie outside the frame, so they are not part of the picture; they were not painted over, they were simply not taken. The second image on the product page shows the whole leaf with the printed section marked in red, so the source is visible for what it is.

The manuscript is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, NAL 1673 — one of the four great illustrated Tacuinum manuscripts, and the one the BnF has digitised in full. The leaf is folio 96 verso.

Read the mug here: Tacuinum Sanitatis: Nix et Glacies, c. 1390 — Porcelain Art Mug. It sits in our antique Christmas mugs — the older, quieter end of the season.

The whole leaf. The red frame marks the section printed on the mug. Tacuinum sanitatis, Lombardy, c. 1390–1400. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, NAL 1673, f. 96v. Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.