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Narrative Illustration and Theological Exposition in Medieval Art
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
This paper deals with a particular narrow aspect of biblical learning, as it appears to have impinged on art some considerable time before 1500. If the material which I have proposed as my subject has relevance to the theme of Religion and Humanism it may be, in the first place, by reminding us that we owe the preservation of many of these works of art to the scholars and clerics of the reformed establishment, men like archbishop Matthew Parker in the late sixteenth century, and even to thoroughly post-medieval practical scientists like Dr William Hunter. They found respectable homes in college or university bookcases for the disjecta membra of the old monastic and cathedral libraries.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1981
References
1 James, M. R., ‘On a MS. Psalter in the University Library’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 8 (Cambridge 1892-3) pp 146-67Google Scholar; Berger, S., ‘Les Manuels pour l’illustration du psautier au XIIIe sièle’, Mémoires de la société nationale des antiquaires de France 57 (Paris 1898) pp 95-134Google Scholar.
2 James, M. R., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library at Manchester 1 (Manchester/London 1921) pp 64–71 Google Scholar.
3 James, M. R., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge 1913) pp 264-70Google Scholar. The ignorance of the artist of CUL MS Ee 4 24 is confirmed by his initial to psalm 68 illustrating the caption ‘Moyses et Aaron descent larche’. The artist has misunderstood the reference to the Ark of the Covenant and represents instead the building of Noah’s Ark.
4 Ruskin, J., Our Fathers Have Told Us, part I, The Bible of Amiens, chap 4, Interpretations (Orpington 1881) pp 67-8Google Scholar; see also Sauerländer, W., Gothic Sculpture in France 1140-1270 (London 1972) pp 460-6Google Scholar.
5 Cassiodorus, [Expositie in psalterium] PL 70 col 338.
6 Petrus Comestor, , Historia scholastka PL 198 (1855) col 1543 Google Scholar.
7 Rufinus, , Commentarius in LXXV psalmos PL 21 (1865) col 939 Google Scholar, ‘Hoc Magi, stella duce, etiam corporaliter impleverunt . ..’ See also Wald, [E. T.] De, [The Stuttgart Psalter, Biblia Folio 23, Wuerttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart] (Princeton 1930) p 65 Google Scholar and fol 84.
8 Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History, trans Walford, E. (London 1855) p 14 Google Scholar.
9 Cassiodorus PL 70 col 12.
10 Ibid col 17.
11 ‘Pilates et Herodes sunt fet amis en la prise Ihesu Crist’ closely following the caption in Rylands MS 22 ‘Pilatus et Herodes fiunt amici in captione Christi’.
12 Isidore, ‘De Psalterio’ In Libros veteris ac novi testamenti prooemia PL 83 (1955) col 163 Google Scholar.
13 Wormald, F. ‘An English Eleventh-Century Psalter with Pictures: British Museum Cotton MS Tiberius C. vi’ Walpole Society 38 (Glasgow 1960-2) pp 1–13 Google Scholar.
14 Glasgow University Library MS Hunter U.3.2 for which see Young, J. and Aitken, P. H., A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow (Glasgow 1908) pp 169-74Google Scholar; also [Kauffmann, C. M.[, [Romanesque Manuscripts 1066-1190[ (London 1975) pp 74-5Google Scholar.
15 For discussion of the Marian cycle see Boase, T. S. R., The York Psalter (London 1962)Google Scholar.
16 Heimann, A., ‘The Capital Frieze and Pilasters of the Portail Royal, Chartres’ Journal of the Warbura and Courtauld Institutes 31 (London 1968) pp 73-102Google Scholar.
17 The suggestion that these picture-leaves come from a lost intermediary copy between the Utrecht psalter and the psalter in Paris, BN MS lat 8846, is made by Heimann, A., ‘The Last Copy of the Utrecht Psalter’, The Year 1200: A Symposium. Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York 1975) p 317 Google Scholar. For the Eadwine psalter, Cambridge Trinity College MS R 17 1, see James, M. R., The Canterbury Psalter (London 1935)Google Scholar.
18 See James, M. R., ‘Four Leaves of an English Psalter 12th Century ...’ Walpole Society 25 (Oxford 1936-7) pp 1–23 Google Scholar; Kauffmann pp 93-6.
19 Parker, E., ‘A Twelfth-Century Cycle of New Testament Drawings from Bury St. Edmunds Abbey’, P[roceedings of the [S[uffolk[I[nstitute of] A[rchaeology[ 31 (Ipswich 1969) pp 263-302Google Scholar; Kauffmann pp 74-5.
20 In all its variety this picture sequence is new and original. But the organization of the programme was probably stimulated, in part at least, by a pre-existing pattern of reference, in the liturgy. Some of the incidents illustrated from Saint John’s gospel, similarly though not identically shaken out of their chronological order, are the subject of readings and antiphons at the various liturgical hours from Sunday in the third week of Lent up to and including Passion Sunday. In the Sarum missal, for which see Procter, F. and Wordsworth, C., Breviarii ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum: Fasciculus 1 (Cambridge 1882)Google Scholar, this lenten sequence consists of the narrative relating to the woman taken for adultery, John 8, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, John 6, the cleansing of the temple, John 2, teaching of Christ about his nature and mission, John 7, the miracle of the man born blind, John 9, the raising of Lazarus, John 11, the teaching of Christ, ‘I am the light of the world’, John 8, and on through Christ’s statements regarding his relations to Abraham, to the threatened stoning and Christ’s escape. This sequence of teaching, with the coming of holy week itself gives way to straightforward chronological readings of the events of the passion and its aftermath from the triumphal entry onwards, and the same jolt into normal chronology occurs in the Pembroke cycle. In these pictures we have an experiment in the selection and display of gospel material worthy of the regard in which the psalter was held as a mirror of Christ’s humanity and divinity, and as a prime tool in liturgical observance.
21 Compare the illustration to psalm 24 in the Stuttgart psalter, De Wald p 28 and fol 31, where Christ, signifying the church according to Saint Augustine, flees from armed men, one of whom is assailing him with stones.
22 De Wald fol 116y.
23 Augustine, Saint, Quaestionum in Pentateuchum libri VII PL 34 (1865) col 650 Google Scholar. See also Isidore, , [Quaestiones in vetu testamentum[ PL 83 (1960) col 308 Google Scholar: ‘Gestavit quippe Moyses typum populi Judaeorum in Christum postea creditori’. Also Petrus Comestor, PL 198 col 1192: ‘Deinceps cum longius abisset potuit a Moyse videri’. A representation of God with a cross numbus, seen by Moses from behind occurs as a type of the transfiguration in a window in S. Francesco at Assisi, for which see Haussherr, R., ‘Der typologische Zyklus der Chorfenster der Oberkirche von S. Francesco zu Assisi’, Kunst als Bedeutungsträger: Gedenkschrift für Günter Bandmann (Berlin 1978) p 105 Google Scholar.
24 Farley, M. A. and Wormald, F., ‘Three Related English Romanesque Manuscripts’ Art Bulletin 22 (Princeton 1940) pp 157-60Google Scholar; Kauffman pp 82-4.
25 With equal ingenuity the annunciation, prime theme of the gospel, is visualized in terms of a passage in one of the old testament minor prophets, Malachi 3: ‘Behold I will send my messenger and he shall prepare the way before me and the Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his temple’. In the vulgate this messenger is an angel, ‘Ecce ego mitto angelum meum . ..’, hence the illustration in the Shaftesbury psalter of God sending out Gabriel.
26 Isidore, PL 83 col 291.
27 Berengaudus, , Exposith super septem visiones libri apocalypsis PL 17(1865) cols 825-6Google Scholar; for Berengaudus sec Vigouroux, F., Dictionnaire de la Bible 1 (Paris 1895) cols 1610-11Google Scholar.
28 Haussherr, R., Bible moralises : Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (Codices sclecti phototypice impressi 40, 40•) (Graz 1973), Comraentarium p 36 Google Scholar. See also Laborde, A. de, La Bibie moralisée conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres (Paris 1911-27)Google Scholar; also Haussherr, R., ‘Sensus litteralis und sensus spiritualis in der Bible moralisée’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, Jahrbuch des Instituts für Frümittelalterforschimg der Universität Münster 6 (Münster 1972) pp 356-80Google Scholar. For the ‘Glossa ordinaria’ see Smalley, B., ‘Gilbertos Universalis, Bishop of London (1128-34) and the Problem of the ‘Glossa Ordinaria”,’ RTAM 7 (1935) pp 233-62Google Scholar; also Smalley, B., The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford 1952)Google Scholar.
29 For the evidence of anti-Jewish polemic in the inscriptions and imagery of the twelfth-century ‘Bury St Edmunds Cross’ in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, see Scarfe, N., ‘The Bury St. Edmunds Cross’, PSIA 33 (Ipswich 1973) pp 75-85Google Scholar.
30 Cassiodorus, PL 70 col 792.
31 Germanus, , Epistolae, PG 98 (1865) col 174 Google Scholar.
32 See Pacht, P., The St. Albans Psalter (London 1960) p 149 Google Scholar.
33 James, M. R., The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: A Descriptive Catalogue 1 (Cambridge 1900) pp 331-7Google Scholar.
34 See Grodecki, L., ‘Les Vitraux allégoriques de Saint-Denis’, Art de France 1 (Paris 1961) pp 19–46 Google Scholar.
35 For Jewish attitudes see No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible, ed Gutmann, J. (New York 1971)Google Scholar.
36 Cambridge, St John’s College MS K26, fol 9, for which see Henderson, G., Gothic (Harmondsworth repr 1978) pp 156-9Google Scholar.
37 Fitzwilliam Museum MS 62, for which see James, M. R., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge 1895) pp 156-74Google Scholar.
38 Bede, , Opera homiletica, ed Hurst, D., CC 122 (1955) pp 11–12 Google Scholar.
39 See above notes 3, 36.
40 Berengaudus, PL 17 col 765.
41 Wentzel, H., ‘Die Christus-Johannes-Gruppe zu Hciligkreuztal’, Pantheon 32 (Munich 1944) pp 25-9Google Scholar.