Biblical Illuminations

Illumination, miniature and initial are often confused. These words denote precise realities, and distinguishing them helps one read a medieval page.

To illuminate is to "put light in"

An illumination is a hand-painted decoration accompanying the text of a manuscript: ornamented initials, painted scenes, frames, border motifs.^[5] The term differs from illustration by its luminous dimension: gold and silver play a central role in it. As the Bibliothèque nationale de France sums it up, the art of the illuminated manuscript combines the writing, painting and goldsmithery of the page.^[6] The illuminator works after the copyist: the scribe leaves empty spaces — a blank at the head of a chapter, a reserved area for a large letter — and the artist then comes to lay down his colours and gold.

Initial, miniature, drollery: the vocabulary of the page

Three words recur constantly:

• The initial (or initial letter) is the first letter of a text, a biblical book or a chapter, enlarged and decorated. When it contains a small figured scene — David playing the harp at the threshold of the Psalms, the Creation at the beginning of Genesis — it is called a historiated initial.^[7]
• The miniature is a painted picture, generally framed, inserted into the page or occupying a whole page. The word does not come from "small": it derives from the Latin minium, a lead-based red pigment once used to trace titles and rubricated letters — not to be confused with vermilion, another red of the palette. Only by a late association with minus ("lesser") did it come to suggest smallness.^[8]
• The drollery is a fanciful or comical figure — animals, hybrids, burlesque scenes — peopling the margins of Gothic manuscripts, as a counterpoint to the sacred text.^[9]

To these are added borders of scrollwork, foliage and flowers, and, in Insular art, carpet pages: whole pages of abstract interlace, without text, laid like ornamental thresholds at the entrance of the Gospels.^[10]

Why illuminate the Bible, and not just any book?

Not all medieval books were illuminated. This effort — costly in time, gold and talent — was reserved for the texts deemed most worthy: first the Bible and liturgical books (evangeliaries, psalters, sacramentaries), then the great prayer collections such as the Books of Hours.^[11] The logic is clear: the book containing the Word of God deserves the finest adornment the hand of man can offer. The book of the Gospels, carried in procession and laid upon the altar, was not a mere reading aid: it was a sacred object, sometimes bound in gold and precious stones, the visible image of Christ the Word in the midst of the assembly.

Making an illuminated Bible took months, sometimes years, and the collaboration of a whole workshop: skin preparers, copyists, illuminators, gilders, binders.

From flock to page: parchment and vellum

Before the spread of paper, the medium was animal skin: parchment (sheep, goat or calf skin, defleshed, stretched, sanded) and, finer and whiter, vellum (skin of a young calf).^[12] The scale is staggering. The Codex Amiatinus, the oldest complete Latin Bible preserved, copied around 700 at Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria, required the skins of more than a thousand beasts; this single volume weighs nearly 34 kilos and runs to more than a thousand folios.^[13] The Winchester Bible, an immense 12th-century Romanesque Bible, is thought to have required the skins of some 250 calves.^[14] A great illuminated Bible was thus, before even the first letter, a whole flock turned into a book.

Gold and colours

The copyist first wrote the text; the illuminator then intervened, following a precise technical order. First gilding, for gold leaf must be laid before the colours: a bed of gesso (a preparation of plaster and glue) or red clay bole is spread, the fine gold leaf is applied to it, then burnished (polished) so that it reflects light like a mirror.^[15] Then come the pigments, laid in successive layers.

The medieval palette was a treasure in itself. The most prestigious colours cost fortunes:

The binders — egg white (glair) and gum arabic — fixed these pigments to the skin.^[16] A single detail recalls the spiritual stake: the purest blue, that of Mary's mantle, was worth more than gold — no expense was spared on matter when it came to depicting heaven.

The scriptorium: copying as spiritual combat

Until the end of the 12th century, most of this production took place in monasteries, in the scriptorium. The material organisation of this work — copying, correction, transmission of texts — is detailed in Monastic Manuscripts. What must be retained here is that copying the Bible was not neutral labour: it was understood as a holy work, almost a form of prayer and combat.

In the 6th century, Cassiodorus, founder of the monastery of Vivarium, gave this work its spiritual charter. In his Institutions, he exalts the copyist who "preaches with the hand":

"Happy resolve, praiseworthy zeal: to preach to men with the hand, to unloose tongues with the fingers, to give salvation to mortals in silence, and to fight with pen and ink against the snares of the devil. For Satan receives as many wounds as the copyist writes words of the Lord." — Cassiodorus, Institutions, I, 30^[17]

This sentence sums up the spirit of all biblical illumination: to copy and adorn Scripture is to disarm evil and spread light. The disproportionate effort that an illuminated Bible represented had no other justification — it was an act of worship offered to the Word.

The history of biblical illumination unfolds in great waves, each with its style, its centres and its masterpieces.

Insular art: the British Isles ablaze with interlace (7th–9th centuries)

In the monasteries of Ireland and Northumbria there arose, in the 7th and 8th centuries, one of the summits of all Christian art: Insular (or Hiberno-Saxon) art. Its hallmark: interlace of unheard-of complexity, spirals, stylised animals, purely ornamental carpet pages, and gigantic initials.

The Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library) were made around 715–720 in the Insular monastery of Lindisfarne. A colophon added in the 10th century attributes the work to Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne (698–721), who is said to have written and illuminated them "for God and for Saint Cuthbert": the exceptional case of a bishop copyist-illuminator working with his own hand.^[18]

The Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College), a copy of the four Gospels in Latin made around 800, is the most famous of illuminated manuscripts. Across its 340 folios, the ornamentation reaches a degree of refinement that is almost unreal: the famous Chi-Rho page (folio 34r), where the Greek monogram of Christ floods the whole page with a profusion of interlace, is regarded as one of the absolute summits of medieval art. It has been thought that the book was meant to be shown upon the altar, so far does imagery there take precedence over ease of reading.^[19]

"At first sight, one would say it was the work of an angel rather than of a man." — Gerald of Wales, on an Insular Gospel book (c. 1185)^[20]

At the same time, Northumbria produced a wholly different kind of monument: the Codex Amiatinus (c. 700, Wearmouth-Jarrow). Abbot Ceolfrith had three complete Bibles copied; the Codex Amiatinus is the sole survivor. It is the oldest complete Latin Bible preserved, and one of the most faithful witnesses to Saint Jerome's Vulgate — so much so that it served the revision of the Latin text in the 16th century. Ceolfrith was carrying it to Rome as a gift for the pope when he died on the way in 716.^[21]

The Carolingian renaissance: the Bible restored to majesty (8th–9th centuries)

Under Charlemagne and his successors, illumination enjoyed a renaissance bound up with the reform of the biblical text. At Tours, the abbey of Saint-Martin, directed from 796 by Alcuin, became the great centre for the production of revised Bibles, copied in a new and legible script, Caroline minuscule. The Tours workshop produced up to two complete Bibles a year, of remarkable quality in calligraphy and decoration.^[22]

From these workshops came the First Bible of Charles the Bald, known as the Vivian Bible: commissioned by Count Vivian, lay abbot of Saint-Martin, it was offered to the king around 845–846. Its pages framed with gilded architecture and its famous dedication miniature make it a summit of Carolingian art.^[23] The same period produced the Utrecht Psalter, a singular masterpiece: its 166 pen drawings, of extraordinary vivacity, translate each psalm into images with a nervous, free line.^[24]

The giant Romanesque Bibles (11th–12th centuries)

The Romanesque age saw the appearance of giant Bibles: enormous volumes laid on abbey lecterns, opened for liturgical reading. Each biblical book opens with a great historiated initial. The Winchester Bible (c. 1160–1175), the largest 12th-century English Bible (pages 58 × 40 cm), is its summit: begun by several masters, it remained unfinished, which today allows us to see every stage of the work, from the mere pen drawing to burnished gold and finished painting.^[25]

The Gothic age: the Moralized Bibles and the Psalter of Saint Louis (13th century)

The 13th century, the century of Paris and the universities, invented an entirely new type of illumination: the moralized Bible. These are manuscripts of extreme luxury, commissioned by the court of France. Each page juxtaposes medallions (the roundels): one circle shows a biblical scene, the next its moral or allegorical interpretation applied to Christian life. The whole formed a veritable catechesis in pictures, in which the reading of Scripture and its spiritual meaning answered one another visually. The fullest versions counted thousands of painted scenes.^[26]

Beside it, the Psalter of Saint Louis (c. 1270) illustrates royal devotion: its full pages, on grounds of gold and Gothic architecture, unroll the sacred history of the Old Testament for the king's prayer.

Books of Hours: the illustrated prayer of the laity (14th–15th centuries)

At the end of the Middle Ages, illumination gradually left the monastery for the lay workshops of the towns, and its most widely circulated object became the Book of Hours: a collection of prayers for lay faithful, organised around the hours of the day and largely nourished by psalms and biblical texts.^[27]

Their absolute summit is the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, begun around 1411–1412 by the Limbourg brothers (Paul, John and Herman) for Duke John of Berry, and left unfinished at the death of the artists and their patron in 1416; the manuscript was completed later, notably by Jean Colombe around 1485–1486.^[28] Its calendar miniatures — the labours of the months before the duke's castles, beneath an azure sky sown with gold — rank among the most famous images in all Western art, and mark the threshold between medieval illumination and modern painting.

Illumination is not only a story of styles and techniques. Behind the thousand-year effort stands a precise theological conviction: visible beauty must serve the Word, because God Himself made Himself visible.

The Word made visible

Christianity is the religion of a God who made Himself flesh: the invisible Word took a face. This logic of the Incarnation grounds the whole legitimacy of the Christian image — a subject treated in Why Does the Church Use Images? and The Difference Between Icon, Idol and Sacred Image. Applied to the book, it yields illumination: if the Word made Himself visible, then the written word of the Word may likewise clothe itself in images and gold. The illuminator does not decorate a profane text; he gives a body of light to the Word, like the evangelist so often painted at the threshold of his Gospel, pen in hand, receiving inspiration.

Gold: the uncreated light

The choice of gold is not decorative; it is doctrinal. Throughout the Christian tradition, God is light — "God is light, and in him is no darkness" (1 John 1:5). Burnished gold, which depicts no colour of the visible world but gives back light itself, becomes the sign of that uncreated light which does not belong to the created order.^[29] It is exactly the same intuition which, at the same time, burst open the walls of Gothic cathedrals to replace them with stained glass — the theology of light developed in Gothic as a Theology of Light and The Stained Glass of Chartres. Stained glass brings light into the church; illumination brings it into the book. To illuminate, let us say it again, is to "put light in".

"Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights." — Saint James, Epistle 1:17^[30]

The book as a sacred object

Finally, illumination expresses the reverence owed to Scripture. A Gospel book covered in gold, carried in procession, censed, kissed by the deacon after the reading and by the celebrant, is not treated as an ordinary object: it is honoured as the presence of the Word in the midst of the people. Material splendour is no vain luxury; it translates, into matter, the infinite dignity of what is written. Cassiodorus's copyist "fights the devil with the pen"; the illuminator, for his part, clothes the Word in light. Both labour, in silence, at the same work: making the holiness of the text visible to the eyes.

The halt came from another revolution of the book. Around 1455, Gutenberg's printing — whose first great masterpiece was, fittingly, a Bible — made the serial reproduction of the text possible. Illumination did not vanish at a stroke: the first printed books left blanks for illuminators to paint initials and miniatures in by hand. But the golden age was past. Within half a century, the illuminated manuscript had become an object of prestige and devotion rather than the normal mode of transmitting the Bible.^[31]

The legacy, for its part, never died out. The masterpieces of biblical illumination — Lindisfarne, Kells, Amiatinus, the Tours Bibles, Winchester, the Très Riches Heures — rank today among the most visited treasures in the world, and go on saying what they always meant to say: that the Word of God deserves the finest that the hand of man can make, and that all true Christian beauty is, at bottom, a way of putting light in.

• Monastic Manuscripts — copying and transmitting texts in the scriptorium, upstream of illumination
• Why Does the Church Use Images? — the doctrinal foundation of the Christian image
• The Difference Between Icon, Idol and Sacred Image — venerating without idolising
• Gothic as a Theology of Light — light as a sign of the divine
• The Stained Glass of Chartres — the "Bible of glass", luminous sister of the illuminated Bible
• Romanesque Art and the Catechesis of Images — teaching the faith through images in the Middle Ages