Miniatures

This large initial comes from a giant Romanesque Bible, where it introduced one of Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Christopher de Hamel has evocatively described this illumination (2018, 23–33), adapted here. Emerging from a background of rich gold leaf signifying sacred space, Paul places one foot outside the initial ‘P’ (for Paulus) as though traversing the boundary between the sacred and the secular. We can understand the gesture he makes with his right hand as one of speech; he addresses a group of attendant Corinthians. Paul’s listeners are wearing soft textile hats, probably imagined as Phrygian caps, appropriate since Corinthians were Greek. The opening words of Corinthians introduce “Paulus vocatus Apostolus” (Paul called to be an Apostle). But, we can imagine that the words he actually pronounces are those on the speech banderole he holds in his left hand on which is written the opening text of I Corinthians: 19-20: “An nescitis q(uonia)m m(em) br [a ... ]” (Do you not know that your body is a temple). One wonders if the rippling, vibrant red background behind Paul’s listeners, described as “startling” by de Hamel, could allude to the fraught relationship between Paul and the Corinthian Church.

Large, often illuminated, and certainly expensive, complete copies of the Bible, usually in several volumes, were produced across Europe in the twelfth century, most often for monasteries. These splendid copies of the Holy Scriptures, sometimes called Giant Bibles, were primarily for liturgical use for reading during the night Office of Matins, and thus they reflect the renewed fidelity to the liturgy born of the monastic reform movement. Select readings from Corinthians were used every day in the liturgy of the Mass, and I Corinthians was read on the first Sunday after Trinity. Many such Bibles were produced in France, from Saint-Remi in Reims, Fleury, Clairvaux and elsewhere, as they became essential components of the well-equipped abbey. One of the most celebrated of these Giant Bibles is the Bible of Souvigny, which was made at the end of the twelfth century for the Cluniac Priory of Saints Peter and Paul in the town of Souvigny (Moulins, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1). It is with this Bible, considered a masterpiece of French medieval art, that our manuscript illumination is most closely related.

Written by the same scribe responsible for the Romanesque Bible of Souvigny, the present fragment comes from the second or final volume of a dismembered Giant Bible made for a Cluniac monastery in the Auvergne in central France. Four sister leaves from the same Bible have come down to us; this one is the only one with a historiated initial. Of the other leaves, three fragments in the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Mn. Mas. 22, 23, and 25) include respectively the opening to Jerome’s prologue to Job, the opening of Jerome’s prologue to the Four Gospels, and the opening to I Galatians, which includes a tall initial ‘P’, the letter that would have followed Corinthians. A fourth complete leaf is in the Lilly Library of Indiana University in Bloomington (MS Ricketts 2). It allows us to calculate the volume’s original impressive dimensions of about 14 ½ × 20 ½ inches with 50 lines of text compared to the smaller Souvigny Bible of 11 × 15 ½ inches with 46 lines of text. The leaves from the collector Jean Masson (1865–1933) in Paris were acquired in 1925, and the leaf in the Lilly Library was purchased by the Chicagoan Coella Lindsay Ricketts in France in 1930. This one also comes from a French sale. De Hamel surmises that the second volume of a two-volume set was disgorged at the suppression of the French monasteries during the French Revolution. 

Although de Hamel ponders whether this dismantled volume could have been a second, twin volume made for Souvigny itself, because of the shared scribe and based on a handbook describing the practices of Cluniac houses as requiring two Bibles, one for the church and one for the refectory, he notes that the record ordering the Souvigny Bible by the sacristan Bernard between 1183 and 1206 mentions only one Bible. Moreover, the illuminator of our fragment is not the same as the artist of the Souvigny Bible, although the wonderful green, red, and blue interlace present on our leaf and the Lilly leaf occur also in the Souvigny Bible. Note also the similarity between the initial ‘P’ at the beginning of Corinthians in the Souvigny Bible and the present initial ‘P’; in both Paul adopts the same pose, with similarities in palette, drapery, and the banderole, and the Corinthians are gathered in the same positions. Related scribes and illuminators also worked on the twelfth-century Bible Clermont-Ferrand (Bibliothèque du Patrimoine, Clermont Auvergne Métropole, MS 1), probably completed by itinerant professionals not monastic artisans from within the foundation. Whatever monastery our fragments came from, their survival is important and expands our knowledge of Cluniac Romanesque style—flat Byzantinizing drapery, bright primary enamel-like colors, crisp interlace—when most Cluniac monuments were subject to mass destruction at the time of the Revolution.