Labors of the Months: May

Hans Wertinger's May from his Labors of the Months series captures the festivities and leisure activities associated with late spring in the Bavarian aristocratic and pastoral tradition. May in the calendar series typically showed courtly pleasures — hawking, outdoor feasting, young men and women gathering flowers — activities that celebrated the season's beauty and the aristocratic life of pleasure associated with spring's renewal. Wertinger's version combines landscape observation with the genre scene of seasonal celebration, creating a work that documents both agricultural conditions and the social culture of early sixteenth-century Bavarian court life.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.