Beauty in the Bible: Illustrating world’s most widely distributed book

Georgia McCafferty, CNN

Updated 10:42 PM EST, Thu March 9, 2017

8548/The British Library

"The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World" by Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle highlights 45 examples from the British Library's vast collection.

8548/The British Library

"The Art of the Bible" tracks the development of Christian art and calligraphy through its use in biblical manuscripts dating back thousands of years.

2289/The Britsh Library

"One of the things we were trying to achieve was to report faithfully and accurately on the development of the text, the way in which the art embellished that text, and what it was used for," says co-author Kathleen Doyle, lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library.

2289/The Britsh Library/The Britsh Library

"It's not a religious book, it's an art book," adds the book's other author, Scot McKendrick, head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library.

The British Library

By the time this manuscript was being made, Christian bookmaking had played an important part in the life of Ethiopians for over 1300 years, according to McKendrick and Doyle.

8548/The British Library

Since the 13th century to the present day, Ethiopians have sustained a remarkable tradition of Christian book illumination.

14075/The British Library /The British Library

In addition to their size and legibility, Romanesque giant Bibles like this one are often distinguished by the beauty of their decoration, according to the authors.

14075/The British Library

A "virtuoso display" of learning is found in Giant Bibles made in the Mosan and Rhenish regions of Germany in particular, according to the authors, although two English examples also survive.

8548/The British Library

Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day in the year 800. With his revival of Roman artistic styles, he sought to recreate the splendor and glory of ancient Rome. A small group of luxury gospel books survive that are clear evidence of the success of that ambition, according to the authors.

The British Library

The Lindisfarne Gospels is critical to our understanding of Anglo-Saxon book production in one of the key centers of Christianity in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages, according to the authors. After the Book of Kells, this lavish manuscript is perhaps the best-known copy of the four Gospels to survive from any period.

The British Library

The book's importance lies in the evidence of its production, the beauty of its illustrations, and the gloss of its text, which is the earliest rendering of the Gospels in the English language, the authors say.

14075/The British Library

For over 1,000 years, Constantinople (now Istanbul) was a byword for awe-inspiring splendor. The city was the Christian capital of the world at the time.

14075/The British Library

The manuscripts are spectacular examples of the painting undertaken there to embellish Christian texts, according to the authors. Now mere fragments, they hint at what fine early manuscripts of the Bible we might have lost.

11861/The British Library

Together with two companion volumes, this manuscript has been described as forming the most beautiful Bible in French ever made, according to the authors.

11861/The British Library/The British Library

Its 77 miniatures, which illustrate a wide range of Old and New Testament subjects, make it among the most complex illustrated Bibles, according to the authors.

2289/The Britsh Library

The pages of this Bible are two feet tall, and are a monument to both the exceptional skills of its producers and the extravagant ambition of its sponsors, according to the authors.

2289/The Britsh Library

Few surviving manuscript Bibles are as large as this, McKendrick and Doyle say.

2289/The British Library Board

Between 1099 and 1187, Crusader kings ruled Jerusalem. One of the most precious survivals from Crusader Jerusalem is this Psalter, according to the authors.

The British library

It is named after Queen Melisende, who reigned jointly with her husband, and subsequently her son, from 1131 until 1152.

11861/The British Library

In England, the taste for large-scale and extensively illuminated Psalters continued throughout the 14th century, say McKendrick and Doyle. The Queen Mary Psalter is one of the most extensively illustrated biblical manuscripts ever produced, containing around 1,000 images.

11861/The British Library

There are 12 manuscripts of the so-called Oxford Psalter from the 12th to 13th centuries, according to the authors. The Winchester Psalter, with an extensive cycle of images, is the most splendid copy of these English manuscripts.

2289/The Britsh Library

"Moralized" Bibles like this are so named because biblical scenes are paired with their symbolic or theological interpretation -- or "moralizations" -- below, with a short biblical extract or explanation next to each picture.

CNN —

It’s the world’s best-selling and most widely distributed book, but most modern Bibles, with their dense black-and-white pages and often austere covers, are not normally associated with art.

However, this wasn’t always the case. For centuries, rich, handmade illustrations and intricate calligraphy brought the biblical texts to life.

Some of the most beautiful examples have been brought together in “The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts From the Medieval World,” a new book by Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle that highlights 45 examples from the British Library’s vast collection of Christian manuscripts.

“Within the Christian tradition, this rich illustration is a way of signifying the recognized importance of the text as being a sacred text,” explains McKendrick, who is head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library.

From the embellished arches of the “Golden Canon Table” – a text from 6th or 7th century Constantinople on gold-painted parchment – to a book of brightly colored gospels from 17th century Ethiopia, “The Art of the Bible” shows the development of the art and calligraphy used to express Christian religion over more than a thousand years.

“We’re very aware that, for many people, this is a sacred, holy text but at the same time it has a historical development, and we wanted to portray that history as accurately as we possibly could,” says Doyle, lead curator of illuminated manuscripts at the British Library.

“It’s not a religious book, it’s an art book,” McKendrick adds.

A public duty

The book proved to be a labor of love for the authors, who took pains to ensure they were presenting a wide chronological and geographic spread that was representative of the many different styles of texts in the library’s collection.

This meant they had to make some difficult decisions along the way.

“Choosing which manuscripts to include was so hard, a bit like saying which of your children do you love the most, because you love them all,” says Doyle.

Ultimately, both authors say it’s given them great satisfaction to make the art within the illuminated Bibles they work with every day more widely available and understood.

“I think there is a strong public duty to make this material accessible, to engage people with it and remind them of what is essentially theirs,” McKendrick says.

“The Art of the Bible: Illuminated Manuscripts From the Medieval World” by Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, published by Thames & Hudson, is available now.