View of the east wall (January and February)

An exceptional secular fresco cycle of the Months (only eleven from the twelve) survived in the Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trent. The eleven panels fill the walls of a room illuminated by two windows, one on the east end and one on the west. The room takes up the third floor of the Eagle's Tower (Torre Aquila), at one time part of Trent's defences. The dimension of the room is 6 x 5,8 m. The height of the frescoes is 3 m, the draped fabric painted below replaces the original wainscoting, which was painted with a sequence of niches.

The pictures of the months in the Eagle's Tower constitute the only such cycle to survive from the early fifteenth century. The scenes have much in common with the sorts of pictures found in Gobelins and in miniature painting. One of the sources for the depictions of everyday life presented in the cycle was a medical textbook, the Tacuinum sanitatis.

Under Georg von Liechtenstein (1360-1419), who was the bishop and temporal ruler of the diocese of Trent between 1390 until his death, the Eagle's Tower, along with the smaller Falcon's Tower, was incorporated into the episcopal palace, the Castel Vecchio. They were connected to the palace by the parapet walks of the city wall, at that time unroofed. (The Castle of Trent was depicted in 1497 by a Dürer's watercolour.)

In the 16th century and later the frescoes were restored and the room decoration was altered. The installation of a wooden spiral stair connecting the three upper floors of tower destroyed the scene of March.

The picture shows the east wall in the Eagle's Tower with the representations of January and February. To the right, where the lost March once stood is the wood paneling that enclosed a spiral staircase; on the left above the entrance is December.

Given the climate of South Tirol, it is appropriate that the January scene presents a snow-covered landscape, in the foreground of which a group of six courtiers is engaged in a snowball fight. The imposing structure in the background is the castle Stenico, near Trent, which Georg von Liechtenstein had restored.

The February scene depicts a tournament and a row of spectators, and in the narrow space remaining to the right of the window it includes a vignette of a blacksmith in his workshop.