The scene of David and Goliath is larger than life on the wall before me in a riot of reds, blues, greens, and oranges. David swings his slingshot and Goliath draws his sword. Knights watch from the sides. Trees are painted in imaginative abstract detail. Medieval architecture is painstakingly reproduced around the edges.
I'm fascinated with lost arts like lace-making, calligraphy, and letter writing. It follows that I'm intrigued with illuminated manuscripts and their exquisite combination of art and text. There's just no modern comparison. And so I visited the recent exhibit of King Louis' Picture Bible at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
The Picture Bible Exhibit
The Walters displayed the Picture Bible in a rare exhibit where the book had been disbound for research purposes. Visitors had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view 26 of the book's pages in a single exhibition. Many of the sets of pages were also reproduced mural size on nearby walls. The exhibit also mixed period artifacts in with the manuscript in exciting ways.
The Book
The Picture Bible, also called the Morgan Crusader Bible because of its preservation in the Pierpont Morgan Library, is a masterpiece of medieval art. The Bible was commissioned in Paris around 1250 by King Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France, to incite soldiers to fight in the Crusades. A crusader from heart and bone, Louis attributed great importance to the war scenes in the Bible, in order to emphasize his crusading ideal and to provide incentives and guidelines to conquer the Holy Land.
The manuscript is a picture Bible without text, known as a historiated Bible. Each page is divided into four sections, allowing the pictures to tell the Bible stories. Its large format chronicles biblical events, telling its stories in great detail and without any text.
At one point it passed into the possession of Cardinal Maciejowski (1548-1608) - the Cardinal Priest of the Holy Roman Church, the Cardinal of Kracow. At another point the manuscript was sent to Shah Abbas the Great of Persia to get his acceptance of Christians and to get a combined military campaign against the Turks. Later it passed into the hands of Jewish owners, probably in the 18th century. As the Bible passed through the hands of these various owners, comments in Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic were added in the margins. These handwritten comments make a very unique study, and add an interesting personal historical touch.
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