Paradiesgärtlein

Around 1410, somewhere on the Upper Rhine, an unnamed painter made this small panel, and a botanist can still walk through it. Roughly two dozen plants grow in the walled garden, rendered so exactly that each species can be named, along with a dozen kinds of bird. That precision is striking for its moment, decades before such close looking at nature became the norm. The garden itself is a religious idea, the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden, an old image of Mary's purity, and she sits not in the centre but off in the top-left corner, quietly reading, while saints rest and potter around her. One works a little fountain, another minds the infant Christ. The mood is calm and domestic, heaven imagined as a warm afternoon inside castle walls.