Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg

The Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg is a small 14th-century illuminated manuscript in tempera, grisaille, ink and gold leaf on vellum.

At the time illuminated manuscripts could compete with monastic scriptoria and panel painting as commercially attractive donor portraits.

The illustrations are attributed to the miniaturist Jean Le Noir, and include graphic representations of astrological predictions by the Roman writer Marcus Manilius.

The choice of iconographical elements and themes are unusually dark, specific, and thought to have originated by request from Jutta, who died thereafter.

[3] The most acclaimed two leaves illustrate the Two Fools and the Three Living and the Three Dead, an allegory of transience and reminder to the viewer of their mortality.

The first page depicts three young courtiers who happen across a cemetery, to find three corpses at varying degrees of decomposition.

The dead mock the young men's superficial outlook, and in what was to become a classic motif of Memento mori, the accompanying text urges reflection by asking "What you are, we once were; what we are, you will be.

[6] The treatment of the birds is so consistent it has been suggested that they were designed by a single hand, although with the weaker examples, he had perhaps been accompanied by a less familiar assistant.