Limbourg Brothers: Très Riches Heures (May), 1416 – Porcelain Art Mug

In May 1411, the courtiers of John, Duke of Berry, ride out in splendour. Clad in robes of spring green — the colour of hope and renewal — they wind through the Bois de Vincennes to the sound of trumpets, their horses garlanded, their laughter carrying across the vellum. Rising behind them in the distance, the towers of the Palais de la Cité — the royal palace on the Île de la Cité in Paris, seat of the French crown — gleam silver-white against a sky of lapis blue.

This is Mois de Mai from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the most celebrated illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages. Painted around 1412–1416 by the Flemish brothers Pol, Herman and Johan Limbourg — three prodigies who died young, their masterwork left unfinished — it depicts the twelve months in scenes of the finest refinement European painting had yet reached. No other medieval book matches its colour, its observation of the natural world, or the sheer joy it takes in human festivity.

The May folio is its most exuberant page: a world at its most alive, before plague and war and the long shadow of the fifteenth century closed in.

The design wraps the cavalcade around the mug. The fourth product image shows the complete original folio — with its gilded outer border and the zodiac calendar arch above, the sun's chariot passing through Gemini — so that what the mug takes and what it leaves are both visible.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Folio for May, Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Limbourg Brothers, c. 1412–1416. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.