Tacuinum Sanitatis: Nix et Glacies, c. 1390 – Porcelain Art Mug

Around 1390 a workshop in Lombardy made a picture book for a north-Italian court. Its text was the Tacuinum sanitatis, a Latin health handbook drawn from the Taqwim al-sihha of the Baghdad physician Ibn Butlan, who died about 1066. Every thing in the world that could touch the body — bread, wind, cheese, sleep, snow — was given one leaf: a framed painting above, a red rubric, and six fixed headings beneath. Its nature. Which kind to choose. What it helps. What it harms. How to cancel the harm. What it produces.

This leaf is Nix et glacies, snow and ice. The painter had a medical rubric to illustrate and painted a snowball fight: a young man in red hose caught mid-turn on the ice, a young woman in blue with a snowball already raised and a second one held ready. Behind them the brown rock of the mountains under fresh snow. It is among the earliest surviving depictions of a snowball fight in European art — read the whole story here.

The print takes the leaf as the illuminator bounded it. The crop follows his own framing line and stops there. Nothing inside it was retouched, nothing added, nothing removed; the red rubric stays where he wrote it. The six paragraphs of Latin below the frame lie outside the frame, and so outside the picture — they are not painted over, they are simply not part of it. The second product image shows the whole leaf with the printed section marked, so the source is visible for what it is.

Tacuinum sanitatis, Lombardy, c. 1390–1400. Tempera and gold on parchment. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, NAL 1673, f. 96v. Public domain.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.