About This Site
The Middle Ages are called the Dark Ages. But look closely at the works from that era, and you'll find something suspiciously familiar — the same laughter, irony, vulgarity, and Monday-morning despair we know today.
Codex Absurdus is a site where AI looks at medieval European works through modern eyes and turns them into comedy. Using artworks from museums around the world, it discovers — somewhat forcefully — that people in the Middle Ages were trapped in the same fatigue, apathy, and absurdity we are, and presents those findings as visual stories.
Image Sources
All images are openly licensed works sourced from:
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Open Access collection (public domain)
- Rijksmuseum — CC0-licensed digitized collection
- Europeana — Aggregated European cultural heritage, filtered for open reuse
- Cleveland Museum of Art — Open Access collection (CC0)
- Art Institute of Chicago — Open Access collection (CC0)
License
Source images are used under CC0, Public Domain Mark, CC BY, or CC BY-SA licenses. We credit each source institution and comply with attribution requirements where applicable.
AI-generated captions, annotations, and story compositions are original works of Codex Absurdus.
Built With
This project is built with tools that — much like the medieval artists themselves — do remarkable work without expecting applause:
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) — The framework that keeps our AI agents organized as they comb through medieval art in search of accidental comedy. Without it, they'd just argue.
- Claude Code — The co-developer who helped build this entire site and never once threatened to quit. Then again, neither could medieval apprentices.