The Cambridge Illuminations at The Fitzwilliam Museum and Cambridge University Library 2005

Date: 04-09-2005
Owning Institution: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010          
Subject:   17th Century  Middle Ages & Earlier  Renaissance    

The beak-nosed mercenary Federigo da Montifeltro, ruler Urbino and main patron of Piero della Francesca, also happened to own the finest private library in fifteenth-century Italy. Long since dispersed, it contained virtually the entire corpus of known Greek and Latin texts, together with many more recently created works: medieval and Renaissance encyclopaedias and studies of natural history; breviaries, missals, Bibles. Federigo had strong views on books and a simple rule of thumb when it came to collecting them. Every volume in his library had to be written out in manuscript form and, preferably, decorated with pictures painted by hand. As far as Urbino’s most illustrious Duke was concerned, the printed book, fruit of the labours of Gutenberg and Caxton, was a vulgar abomination – a thin, tawdry, mass-produced object, which served only to debase the properly solemn acts of reading and writing.

The sort of manuscripts that Federigo might have commissioned were richly illustrated copies of Cicero or Macrobius, written not in Gothic script but in the new Latinate scripts favoured by Renaissance humanists, antecedents of the now ubiquitous Times New Roman. Yet, as Federigo himself may have suspected, the invention of printing marked the beginning of the end for that type of painstakingly illuminated volume. That is why Renaissance manuscripts – including, indeed, a very fine copy of Cicero’s De Officiis – come right at the end of “The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West”, an enthralling exhibition divided between the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Cambridge University Library. Such books amounted to the last gasp of a great tradition. They were created on the cusp of a change in the very nature of the book, which, in its printed form, became a medium for the mass-dissemination of knowledge – accelerating scientific enquiry, raising religious debate to fever pitch, altering the texture of European thought and experience. Printing represented progress of a kind that could not be held back. None the less, “The Cambridge Illuminations” does much to explain why Federigo might have felt that it represented a backwards step.

This is the largest exhibition of illuminated manuscripts to have been held in this country for almost a century. Drawn from the most important western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts held in collections in Cambridge, a little more than two hundred books have been sparely and sensitively displayed – the majority in a series of glass cases in three generous, interconnecting, low-lit rooms at the Fitzwilliam. Wandering among them, gazing on page after page of heavy vellum, rich with coloured story and glittering with finely applied gold leaf, it is difficult to suppress the melancholy awareness that books will never be as beautiful again.

The earliest exhibit in the show is not only a book but also a kind of talisman, or holy relic. Known as “The Gospels of St Augustine of Canterbury”, this manuscript, now the property of Corpus Christi College, was almost certainly brought to England by St Augustine himself when he arrived in 597 AD with the aim of converting the English to Christianity. Possibly intended as a gift to King Ethelbert of Kent, the manuscript was created in either Italy or Gaul at some time in the sixth century and is embellished with a small but vivid depiction of twelve scenes from Christ’s Passion, painted in light pastel colours and, unusually, arranged in comic-strip grid formation. The book is hallowed for its association with the origins of Christianity in England, and has become part of the ritual of the enthronement of Archbishops of Canterbury. But it is also a fascinating object in itself. The style of the pictures that decorate it is not vastly sophisticated, but they tell their story with an almost disconcerting directness of drama and feeling. The Betrayal of Christ by Judas, in particular, has been eloquently distilled to a scene of traitorous embrace. Arranged as a kind of mural on vellum, these tiny sixth-century pictures resemble Giotto’s great cycle of frescoes for the Arena Chapel, in embryo – but created nearly eight centuries before.

Nearby, another wonderful early book from the Corpus Christi collection is an eighth-century Northumbrian manuscript of Luke and John, open at a page decorated with taut, linear capitals embellished in a style very close to that of the more famous Lindisfarne Gospels. Here, the so-called Insular Style seems anything but, the letters and their embellishments treated as pretexts for grandly abstract designs formed from twisting knots of Celtic pattern. Another very early book, Bede’s History, proves that script alone can have its own drama and visual eloquence. Written by an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon scribe in so-called scriptio continua – a form of writing that leaves no space between the words – the manuscript was dashed down so quickly that numerous phrases have been omitted and tenses are frequently incorrect. An urgent deadline was evidently being met. Yet the script remains extraordinarily regular, words flowing across the page in implacable waves of ink. Centuries may have passed since its creation, but the manuscript still contains within it a sense of the urgency that gave it being – as well as a sense of the thirst for Bede’s work among an Anglo-Saxon people whose history he had attempted, for the first time, to set down.

The exhibition contains much fascinating liturgical material and numerous biblical manuscripts and commentaries, including a spectacular Apocalypse, eschatologically charged to the point of delirium. Created in mid-thirteenth century England, its pages crawl with angels of doom with rainbow-coloured wings and snake-tailed, seven-headed beasts, painted in the brightest vermilion. This is a fine example of the book as warning, and as incitement to virtue. The dimly gleaming gold-encrusted capitals of a fifteenth-century Gradual from Venice, each one the frame for a miniature painting in the style known as International Gothic, might almost be said to compress the experience of visiting St Mark’s Cathedral to the scale of a book. An early fourteenth-century Pontifical created for Renaut de Bar, Bishop of Metz, has been left open at two scenes of The Blessing of An Abbot, anchored to the page by decorated capitals that have sprouted long and delicate tendrils resembling the creations of some nonpareil Burgundian goldsmith. The pictures that illustrate these pages might seem unexceptional were it not for their spectacular backgrounds, created from abstract diamonds of gold and red, and gold and blue, that seem to buzz and vibrate in the penumbral lighting of the galleries. The effect is similar to that attempted by many abstract painters of the 1960s and 1970s although, in the context, a form of religious intent may underlie the abstract device. The crozier-waving rituals of benediction, a piece of rather mundane drama, are imbued with a sense of the sacred, set in a pictorial world that shivers and shimmers before the eyes, as if charged with a form of spiritual electricity.

Later books such as these are almost the equivalent of portable art galleries, filled with miniature pictures. Many have been given trompe l’oeil frames, and have been placed on pages much less dense with script than medieval manuscripts, so they almost resemble paintings hung on a wall. Their creation was by no means limited to the continent. One of the most beautiful secular volumes in the exhibition is an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, created by an artist working in London whose name is now unknown. It is open at its frontispiece, an imaginary landscape in which, set against a sky of pure gold leaf, fairy-tale castles on schematically indicated hills evoke the ancient city of Troy. Instead of illustrating a moment from the poem, however, the artist has had the happy notion of depicting Chaucer himself, reading his own story from a pulpit set in the middle of the landscape. The Trojans – his subject, so to speak, having been turned into his audience – flood out of the city and gather round to hear him recite his tale.

This small but beautiful illumination, painted within around 20 years of the poet’s death has – like the book with which this exhibition begins – acquired something of the status of a relic. Lightly bearded, Chaucer’s sharply intelligent face conveys a strong impression of benign and magisterial calm. The area around it has been hazed and blurred by thumbing, innumerable marks made by readers pointing out, to themselves and others, the likeness of Chaucer himself. The result is a small but telling patch of loss – a visible residue of that mixture of awe, and intimate pleasure, that the illuminated book aroused in so many of its admirers, through so many centuries.