THE MANUSCRIPT AND ITS PURPOSE

The present chapter concerns the Dominican Meditations, here referred to as the DM, an illustrated devotional manuscript once owned by the Dominican friars of Krakow, Poland's capital and the royal seat during the later Middle Ages. An Old Polish note claims the manuscript was made “in the Convent of the Holy Trinity the Year of the Lord 1532,” though most of the vernacular texts accompanying the pictures may have been written slightly earlier. Four scribes and two illuminators were involved in its production. One painter, the Garden Master, completed the first 33 of the DM's 117 extant miniatures (4 were apparently lost, since the Prologue records a total of 121); the other artist, the Passion Master, did the remaining 84.

About 1721 the DM passed to the Order of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Krakow, who in 1965 permitted a study and black-and-white facsimile containing eight color plates of a selection of the miniatures. Since then the DM has, to my knowledge, not been available to scholars. Shortly after receiving the manuscript the nuns copied all of its illustrations in tempera on paper through a system of exact tracings, relatively faithful to the colors of the original pictures. Consequently, these eighteenth-century paper copies can be used as guides in studying the clothing colors in the original parchment miniatures (Fig. 7.1a, b).

According to the DM's Prologue, the ostensible purpose of the text and picture ensemble was to allow the user to recite certain prayers while contemplating the miniatures in order to gain 160 days of indulgence from Purgatory per picture. But in a larger sense it was to place the user in a personal and dramatic relationship with events of Christ's life, particularly those involving his tormentors, about whom little is said in the canonical Gospels. To contemporize Christ's suffering, the artist has imaginatively “refashioned” these tormentors, by making the cut and color of their attire resemble garments and accessories worn by German mercenary soldiers called landsknechte (the term means literally servants of the country), a force created in 1487 by the Emperor Maximilian I to advance his political aims.4 In addition, the artist also drew on garment features of social outcasts in earlier medieval art, such as pagans, executioners, and even Krakow's royal fools.