This page from the Codex Manesse (Heidelberg University Library, Cod. Pal. germ. 848) depicts the Middle High German poet Walther von der Vogelweide in the conventional posture of contemplative composition: seated, head resting on his hand, sword laid across his lap, the famous opening line of one of his most-quoted poems (Ich saz uf einem steine, I sat upon a stone) embedded in the visual composition. The illustration accompanies a complete corpus of Walther's surviving lyrics in the manuscript.

The Codex Manesse is the largest and most richly illustrated surviving collection of Middle High German Minnesang and Spruchdichtung poetry: 426 parchment folios containing approximately 6,000 verses by 140 named poets, arranged hierarchically from the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VI at the opening through princes, counts, knights, and finally bourgeois town poets. Each poet's section is preceded by a full-page miniature depicting the poet in characteristic activity (tournament, hawking, romantic encounter, courtly performance). The 137 surviving miniatures are the canonical visual record of high-medieval German courtly culture.

The manuscript was compiled in Zürich between approximately 1304 and 1340, probably under the patronage of the Manesse family of Zürich patricians who systematically collected Middle High German lyric over a generation. After centuries of obscurity it surfaced in the seventeenth century in Heidelberg, was carried to Paris during the Thirty Years' War, returned to Heidelberg in 1888 by Bismarck after diplomatic negotiation, and has been the central holding of the Heidelberg University Library since. The Codex Manesse is to Middle High German literature what the Squarcialupi Codex is to trecento Italian music: the foundational scribal collection that preserves the canon.