Medieval books at Arthur Ross Gallery

A world held in your hand:
The power of medieval books

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

Someone once left my local library in Yeadon his private library. Not knowing what to do with so great a windfall, the administration promptly bundled the books off to the sale table in the lobby where, for a time, you could purchase a book for a penny. That’s right—one cent—and this at a time when you couldn’t even get a chewing gum ball from a vending machine for a penny. I recall that I scooped up an old Modern Library edition of Arthur Schnitzler’s Bertha Garlan, which I later gave to a friend. At the price, I could afford to be generous.

It’s sad when a sugar-coated ball of chewing gum is more highly valued than a book into which an author has placed the fruits of his life experiences. But it wasn’t always so. “Treasured Pages. Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts from the Free Library of Philadelphia,” at the Arthur Ross Gallery, takes us back to a time when books— and indeed the written word— were highly valued commodities, painstakingly transcribed by hand, illustrated by artists in bright colors and sometimes even embellished with real gold.

The king makes his case

This was a time when a newly victorious king in a vicious civil war would commission a scroll a good ten feet long to illustrate the justness of his claims by tracing his lineage, in words and images, all the way back to Adam and Eve. And monks learned the ins and outs of the Seven Deadly Sins by studying intricately drawn diagrams of interlocking circles. What may seem silly or even bizarre to us was pure wisdom to them.

Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church was the biggest consumer of books. After all, the Church’s scriptoria created them. In addition to Bibles and collections of the Psalms, the Church needed liturgical guides, Books of Hours, instructional manuals—and each abbey and convent had its own library to be supplied. It was a very good time to be a scribe, as the many books, interspersed with the scrolls and manuscript leaves clearly attest.

The world conveyed in a single image

I’ve always been drawn to Medieval art simply because those artists seemed to have a gift for reproducing an entire world and making it understandable, in a single emblematic image. This gift is repeatedly displayed in the books, scrolls and manuscript leaves that comprise “Treasured Pages.” Because the scribes lived in a world of absolute certitude, it was a fairly easy thing for them to encompass big notions in compact spaces. They didn’t have to contend with the gray areas— the subtleties and fine shades of meaning that are the lot of contemporary artists. Their simple modeling and bold colors further emphasize that this is an easy, not a difficult world to navigate through. A few of the later French illustrations are strikingly like those to be found in modern children’s books of the more refined sort.

This is a fairly large exhibition and— surprise, surprise! —the manuscript contents are drawn from the Rare Books and Manuscript Department of our own Free Library of Philadelphia! Who could have known such wisdom and so many works of art lay concealed within that Temple on the Parkway?