A Landscape

From the Getty Museum record

Four trees bearing differently shaped and colored fruits occupy the space between four cities in this image. A lightly colored river also cuts across the foreground. This illumination once accompanied the beginning of the fifteenth book of *On the Properties of Things*, which identified the different regions of the earth and explained their respective properties. Medieval geographic study was imbued with cultural assumptions and biases that had been passed on from the ancient world, and many authors never visited the areas outside of Europe that they wrote about. The four trees and four cities in this image relate to areas described in the text, though no specific differentiating features are included other than the fruits, and no one area seems to necessarily take preeminence over the others.