Good Reading

The Baltimore Museum of Art was turned into a library last week, but none of the books would be taken out or even touched. The museum had joined with the Walters Art Gallery of Baltimore to exhibit 233 illuminated manuscripts--the biggest and best collection ever shown in the U.S.

Abstractions In Canterbury. The earliest of the manuscripts, dating from the dark ages of Europe, had been strongboxes of Christian culture. Done mostly on calfskin parchment and laced with burnished gold and rainbow colors, they had kept fresh and shining through the centuries. One of them, an 8th Century psalter believed to have been made by the monks of Canterbury, was decorated with twining capital letters as abstract and whimsically complicated as any paintings produced today. Another, dating from the early 9th Century in France, was a book of the four Gospels written entirely in gold on pages dyed purple.

Charlemagne, who thirsted for culture as much as for conquest,* left his personal stamp on the manuscript art. He used to complain that the prevailing script was too knotty to read; to rectify it the Emperor invited the Northumbrian monk Alcuin to teach the Franks a comparatively simple hand inherited from the days of Roman rule. The script did not stay simple: by the 13th Century, manuscript texts had become as tangled as briar patches. The gnarled letters of ladies' prayer books were twined about with ornamental thorns, and even the page borders swarmed with children and gargoyles.

Landscapes in G. Initial letters swelled to full-page size and came to enclose miniature paintings sometimes as detailed as murals. Within one huge blue and rose G, an artist had drawn St. Francis kneeling to receive the stigmata (see cut). Gradually the illustrations were separated from the text, and sometimes they almost supplanted it--so that bumpkin barons and illiterate lords could "read" their books like comic strips. They had no trouble identifying each character; the beasts were beastly, the saints saintly, and the maidens maidenly.

With printing and the late Renaissance, manuscript-making entered its long decline. The last book in the show was a 17th Century Calligraphic Specimen, a prayer bedecked with gay flourishes and signed by one Friar Didace of Paris, self-described as "a poor little Capuchin, very unworthy."

What made the manuscripts stand up so well as art? Primarily it was their richness. They were never made to glance at, like a picture on a wall, but to read again & again.

* And was eventually buried, at Aachen, sitting up with a manuscript, the Coronation Book, across his knees.

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