A Scholar Points to a Roundel Featuring a City

From the Getty Museum record

This image would have likely opened the section of the encyclopedic text *On the Properties of Things* discussing both weather and air. Air was one of the four elements considered by medieval people to make up all matter and form in the universe. In the illumination, a scholar set against an abstracted, patterned background gestures to a roundel featuring a river and a landscape with trees and buildings. In the Middle Ages, weather predictions were made through distilling astronomical and environmental observations with astrological theories.