Category Archives: Decline of the West of What’s East

The detail is gorgeous.

The  J. Paul Getty Museum has added a prized, 750-year-old Bible from Italy to its noted collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts, and the museum says it will go on display Dec. 13 as a highlight of the upcoming exhibition, “Gothic Grandeur: Manuscript Illumination 1250-1350.”

The Getty’s announcement says that the so-called Abbey Bible, named for a former British owner, was created in the mid-1200s for a Dominican monastery. According to museum officials, it  “is one of the earliest and finest” illuminated Bibles to have emerged from Bologna in northern Italy, “one of the major centers” where scribes turned Latin scripture into art.

As an aesthetic achievement, it is priceless. That level of craftsmanship is as dead as Charlemagne. But isn’t odd that that was what Bibles were often reduced to: objects d’art?

Now there certainly were profound biblical exegetes in this period, Thomas Aquinas being foremost among them. And Scripture was of course read in Mass. But one wonders whether the embellishment of the books themselves were a reflection of their rarity and the unique status they enjoyed — or whether it was an attempt to evoke some kind of quasi-mystical experience simply my exposing the spectator to its beauty, as if by extension it would evoke the beauty of transcendence and thereby serve some higher spiritual purpose for those who could not read?

I also wonder whether it was an attempt to objectify the Word itself for fear that its power would prove unpredictable and uncontrollable were it not framed in amber as some kind of cultural artifact.

These are not mutually exclusive options, of course.