ne summer afternoon in 1978, a voluminous parcel arrived in the offices of the publisher Franco Maria Ricci in Milan, where I was working as foreign-language editor. When we opened it we saw that it contained, instead of a manuscript, a large collection of illustrated pages depicting a number of strange objects and detailed but bizarre operations, each captioned in a script none of the editors recognized. The accompanying letter explained that the author, Luigi Serafini, had created an encyclopedia of an imaginary world along the lines of a medieval scientific compendium: each page precisely depicted a specific entry, and the annotations, in a nonsensical alphabet which Serafini had also invented during two long years in a small apartment in Rome, were meant to explain the illustrations’ intricacies. Ricci, to his credit, published the work in two luxurious volumes with a delighted introduction by Italo Calvino; they are one of the most curious examples of an illustrated book I know. Made entirely of invented words and pictures, the Codex Seraphinianus1 must be read without the help of a common language, through signs for which there are no meanings except those furnished by a willing and inventive reader.
This is, of course, a brave exception. Most of the time, a sequence of signs follows an established code, and only my ignorance of the code makes it impossible for me to read it. Even so, I wander through an exhibition at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, of Indian miniatures depicting mythological scenes of stories with which I’m not familiar, and attempt to reconstruct their sagas; I sit in front of the prehistoric paintings on the rocks of the Tessali Plateau in the Algerian Sahara and try to imagine what menace pursues the fleeing giraffe-like creatures; I flip through a Japanese comic book at Narita Airport and make up a narrative for characters who speak in a script I have never learned. Attempting to read a book in a language I don’t know — Greek, Russian, Cree, Sanskrit — reveals of course nothing to me; but if the book is illustrated, even if I can’t read the captions I can usually assign a meaning — though not necessarily the one explained in the text. Serafini counted on his readers’ creative skill.
Serafini had a reluctant precursor. In the last few years of the fourth century, Saint Nilus of Ancyra (now Ankara, the capital of Turkey) founded a monastery near his native town. Of Nilus we know almost nothing: that his feast day is November 12, that the year of his death was circa 430, that he was the author of several sententious and ascetical treatises intended for his monks and of more than a thousand letters to his superiors, his friends and his congregation, and that, in the days of his youth, he studied under the famous Saint John Chrysostom in Constantinople.2 For centuries, until scholarly detectives stripped the saint’s life down to these bare bones, Saint Nilus had been the hero of a prodigiously unusual story.3 According to the Septem narrationes de caede monarchorum et de Theodulo filio, a sixth-century compilation once read as a hagiographical chronicle and now shelved among romances and fictional tales of adventure, Nilus was born in Constantinople of a noble family and was appointed officer and prefect to the court of Emperor Theodosius the Great. He married and had two children but, filled with spiritual longings, abandoned his wife and daughter and in 390 or 404 (retellings of his story vary in their imaginative precision)4 entered the ascetic congregation of Mount Sinai, where he and his son, Theodulus, led pious and reclusive lives. According to the Narrationes, the virtue of Saint Nilus and his son was such that “it provoked demons to hatred and angels to envy”. As a result of this angelic and demonic displeasure, in 410 a horde of Saracen bandits attacked the hermitage, massacred a number of monks and took others away as slaves, among them the young Theodulus. By divine grace Nilus escaped both the sword and the chains, and set off in search of his son. He found him in a town somewhere between Palestine and Arabia Petrea, where the local bishop, moved by the saint’s devotion, ordained both father and son as priests. Saint Nilus returned to Mount Sinai, where he died at a pleasant old age, lulled by bashful angels and repentant demons.5
We do not know what Saint Nilus’s monastery was like, or where exactly it was located, but in one of his many letters6 he describes certain ideal features of ecclesiastical decoration which we may assume he used in his own chapel. Bishop Olympidorus had consulted him about the erection of a church which he wished to decorate with images of saints, hunting scenes, birds and animals. Saint Nilus, while approving the depiction of saints, condemned the hunting scenes and the fauna as “trifling and unworthy of a manly Christian soul” and suggested instead scenes from the Old and New Testament “painted by the hand of a gifted artist”. These, he argued, set up on either side of the Holy Cross, would “serve as books for the unlearned, teach them scriptural history and impress on them the record of God’s mercies.”7
Saint Nilus imagined the illiterate faithful coming to these scenes in his functional church and reading them as if they were the words of a book. He imagined them looking up at decorations that were no longer “trifling adornments”; he imagined them identifying the precious images, linking one with another in their minds, inventing stories for them or recognizing in the familiar pictures associations with sermons they had heard or, if they happened to be not totally “unlearned”, with exegeses from the Scriptures. Two centuries later, Pope Gregory the Great would echo Saint Nilus’s views: “It is one thing to worship a picture, it is another to learn in depth, by means of pictures, a venerable story. For that which writing makes present to the reader, pictures make present to the illiterate, to those who only perceive visually, because in pictures the ignorant see the story they ought to follow, and those who don’t know their letters find that they can, after a fashion, read. Therefore, especially for the common folk, pictures are the equivalent of reading.”8 In 1025 the Synod of Arras stated that “what simple people could not grasp through reading the scriptures could be learned by means of contemplating pictures.”9
Although the Second Commandment given by God to Moses specifically forbids the making of graven images of “any likeness of any thing that is in the heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”,10 Jewish artists decorated religious sites and objects as far back as Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.11 At times though, the interdiction prevailed, and Jewish artists resorted to inventive compromises, such as giving the forbidden human figures bird heads so as not to depict the human face. The controversy was resurrected in Christian Byzantium during the eighth and ninth centuries, when Emperor Leo III and later the iconoclastic emperors Constantine V and Theophilus banned the depiction of images throughout the empire.
For the ancient Romans, the symbol of a god (the eagle for Jupiter, for instance) was a substitute for the god himself. In the rare cases when Jupiter is represented together with his eagle, the eagle is not a repetition of the god’s presence but becomes his attribute, like his thunderbolt. For the early Christians symbols had this double quality, standing not merely for the subjects (the lamb for Christ, the dove for the Holy Spirit) but also for specific aspects of the subjects (the lamb as the sacrificial Christ, the dove as the Holy Spirit’s promise of deliverance).12 They were not meant to be read as synonyms of the concepts or mere duplicates of the deities. Instead they graphically expanded certain qualities of the central image, commented on them, underlined them, turned them into subjects in their own right.
Eventually, the basic symbols of early Christianity appear to have lost some of their symbolic function and become in fact little more than ideograms: the crown of thorns standing for the Passion of Christ, the dove for the Holy Spirit. These elementary images were gradually complemented by vaster and more complex ones, so that entire episodes of the Bible became symbols of various aspects of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of the life of the Virgin, as well as becoming illustrations of certain readings of other sacred episodes. Perhaps this richness of meaning is what Saint Nilus had in mind when he suggested counterpointing the New and Old Testament by depicting them on either side of the Holy Cross.
From a fourteenth-century German Haggadah, a cantor at the reading desk in the synagogue, his face replaced by that of a bird to satisfy the Old Testament’s injunction against representing the human figure. (photo credit 7.1)
The fact that images from the Old and New Testament could complement one another and continue each other’s narrative, teaching “the unlearned” the Word of God, had already been suggested by the evangelists themselves. In his gospel, Matthew explicitly linked the Old and New Testament at least eight times: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet.”13 And Christ Himself said that “all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.”14 There are 275 literal quotations of the Old Testament in the New, plus 235 specific references.15 This concept of a spiritual continuity was not new even then; a contemporary of Christ, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, had developed the idea of an all-pervading mind manifesting itself throughout the ages. That single and omniscient spirit is present in Christ’s words, which described it as a wind that “bloweth where it listeth”, and links past to present and future. Origen, Tertullian, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Ambrose all wrote imaginatively of common images in both testaments, and elaborated complex and poetic explanations in which no single element of the Bible passed by unremarked or unexplained. “The New Testament,” wrote Saint Augustine in a much-quoted couplet, “lies hidden in the Old, while the Old is disclosed in the New.”16 And Eusebius of Caesarea, who died in 340, proclaimed that “every prophet, every ancient writer, every revolution of the state, every law, every ceremony of the Old Covenant points only to Christ, announces only Him, represents only Him.… He was in Father Adam, progenitor of the saints; He was innocent and virginal like a martyr in Abel, a renewer of the world in Noah, blessed in Abraham, the high priest in Melchisedec, a willing sacrifice in Isaac, chief of the elect in Jacob, sold by His brothers in Joseph, powerful in work in Egypt, a giver of laws in Moses, suffering and forsaken in Job, hated and persecuted in most of the prophets.”17
Christ as the Lamb that washes away the sins of the world, in the famous Ghent Altarpiece by H. and J. Van Eyck. (photo credit 7.2)
By the time of Saint Nilus’s recommendation, the iconography of the Christian Church was already developing conventional pictures of the Spirit’s ubiquity. One of the earliest examples can be seen on a two-panelled door carved in Rome in the fourth century and installed in the Church of St. Sabina. The panels depict corresponding scenes from the Old and New Testament which can be read simultaneously. The workmanship is somewhat rough and the details have been blurred by generations of fingering pilgrims, but the scenes can be easily identified. On one side are three of the miracles attributed to Moses: the sweetening of the waters of Marah, the provision of manna during the flight from Egypt (depicted in two sections) and the striking of water from a rock. On the other are three of the miracles of Christ: the restoring of sight to the blind man, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and the turning of water into wine for the wedding at Cana.
Two panels from the doors of the Church of Saint Sabina in Rome contrasting, to the left, three miracles of Christ, and, to the right, those of Moses. (photo credit 7.3)
What would a Christian, looking upon the doors of St. Sabina in the mid-fifth century, have read? The tree with which Moses sweetened the bitter waters of Marah would have been recognized as the Cross, symbol of Christ Himself. The spring, like Christ, was a fount of living water giving life to the Christian flock. The desert rock that Moses struck would also have been read as an image of Christ, the Saviour from whose side flows both the blood and the water.18 The manna foreshadowed the food of Cana and of the Last Supper.19 An unbeliever, however, not instructed in the Christian faith, would read the images on the doors of St. Sabina much as Serafini intended his readers to understand his fantastical encyclopedia: by making up, from the depicted elements, a story and a vocabulary for themselves.
This, of course, was not what Saint Nilus had in mind. In 787, the Seventh Church Council in Nicaea made it clear that not only was the congregation not free to interpret the pictures shown in church, but neither was the painter free to lend his work any private significance or resolution. “The execution of pictures is not an invention of the painter,” the council declared, “but a recognized proclamation of the laws and tradition of the overall Church. The ancient fathers caused them to be executed on the walls of the churches: it is their thought and tradition that we see, not that of the painter. To the painter belongs the art, but the arrangement belongs to the Church fathers.”20
When Gothic art began to flourish in the thirteenth century, and painting on church walls was abandoned in favour of pictorial windows and carved columns, the biblical iconography was transferred from plaster to stained glass, wood and stone. The lessons of the Scriptures now shone with light and stood out in rounded forms, narrating to the faithful stories in which the New and the Old Testament subtly mirrored each other.
Then, sometime in the early fourteenth century, the images Saint Nilus had intended for the faithful to read on the walls were reduced and collected in the shape of a book. In the regions of the Lower Rhine, several illuminators and woodblock engravers began to depict the echoing images on parchment and paper. The books they created were made almost entirely out of juxtaposed scenes, with just a few words, sometimes as captions on the sides of the page and sometimes issuing from the mouths of characters in banner-like cartouches, like the balloons in today’s comic strips.
By the end of the fourteenth century these books of images had become hugely popular, and they were to remain so throughout the Middle Ages, in all their various guises: volumes of full-page drawings, meticulous miniatures, hand-tinted woodblock prints and finally, in the fifteenth century, printed tomes. The first such volume we possess dates from 1462.21 In time, these extraordinary books came to be known as Bibliae Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor.
Essentially, these “Bibles” were large picture-books in which each page was divided to allow for two or more scenes. For instance, in the so-called Biblia Pauperum of Heidelberg,22 from the fifteenth century, the pages are divided into two halves, upper and lower. The lower half of one of the first pages depicts the Annunciation, and would have been shown to the faithful on that liturgical date. Surrounding the scene are the four Old Testament prophets who foresaw the coming of Christ: David, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel. Above them, in the upper half, are two Old Testament scenes: God cursing the snake in the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve standing coyly to one side (Genesis, 3); and the angel calling Gideon to action, while Gideon lays the fleece on the ground to find out if God will save Israel (Judges, 6).
A sequential page from the Heidelberg Biblia pauperum. (photo credit 7.4)
Chained to a lectern, opened to an appropriate page, the Biblia Pauperum would display its double images to the faithful sequentially, day after day, month after month. Many would not be able to read the words in Gothic script surrounding the depicted personages; few would grasp the several meanings of each image in their historical, moral and allegorical significance. But the majority of the people would recognize most of the characters and scenes, and be able to “read” in those images a relationship between the stories of the Old Testament and the stories of the New, simply because of their juxtaposition on the page. Preachers and priests would no doubt gloss upon these images, and retell the events portrayed, linking them in an edifying manner, embroidering on the sacred narration. And the sacred texts themselves would be read, day in, day out, all through the year, so that in the course of their lives people would likely hear much of the Bible many times. It has been suggested that the main purpose of the Biblia Pauperum was not to provide reading for the unlettered flock but to lend the priest a sort of prompter or thematic guide, a starting-place for sermons or addresses, helping him to demonstrate the unity of the Bible.23 If this was so (no document exists to confirm its purpose), then, like most books, it had a variety of users and uses.
Almost certainly, “Biblia Pauperum” was not the name by which these books were known by their first readers. The misnomer was discovered late in the eighteenth century by the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, himself a devoted reader who believed that “books explain life”. In 1770, poor and sick, Lessing accepted the badly paid post of librarian to the stolid Duke of Braunschweig, at Wolfenbüttel. There he spent eight miserable years, wrote his most famous play, Emilia Galotti, and in a series of critical essays discussed the relationship between different forms of artistic representation.24 One of the books in the Duke’s library was a Biblia Pauperum. Lessing found, scribbled on one of the margins by a later hand, the inscription Hic incipitur bibelia [sic] pauperum. He deduced from this that the book, in order to be catalogued, had required some sort of name, and that an ancient librarian, inferring from the many illustrations and the sparseness of text that it was intended for the illiterate, that is, the poor, had given it a title that future generations took to be authentic.25 As Lessing remarked, however, several examples of such bibles were far too ornate and costly to be meant for the poor. Perhaps what mattered was not ownership — what belonged to the Church might be considered to belong to all — but access; with its pages open on the appropriate days for all to inspect, the fortuitously named Biblia Pauperum escaped confinement among the learned and became popular among the faithful, who were hungry for stories.
Lessing also drew attention to the similarities between the book’s parallel iconography and that of the stained glass in the windows of the Hirschau cloister. He suggested that the illustrations in the book were copies of those in the windows; he also dated the windows from the time of Abbot Johan von Calw (1503 to 1524), almost half a century before the Wolfenbüttel copy of the Biblia Pauperum was executed. Modern research indicates that it was not a copy,26 but whether the iconography of both the book and the windows merely followed a fashion that had gradually established itself over several centuries is impossible to say. Lessing, however, was right in noting that the “reading” of the pictures in the Biblia Pauperum and on the stained-glass windows was essentially the same act, and that both were different from reading a description in words on a page.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. (photo credit 7.5)
For the literate Christian of the fourteenth century, a page of an ordinary bible had a multiplicity of meanings through which the reader could progress according to the guiding gloss of the author or the reader’s own knowledge. A reader would pace this reading at will, over an hour or a year, with interruptions or delays, skipping sections or devouring the whole page at one sitting. But the reading of an illustrated page in the Biblia Pauperum was almost instantaneous, since the “text” was offered iconographically as a whole, without semantic gradations, and the time of the narration in pictures necessarily coincided with that of the reader’s own reading. “It is relevant to consider,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, “that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data on objects, and the resulting high degree of participation by the viewer in order to complete what is only hinted at in the mosaic mesh of dots.”27
For me, centuries away, the two kinds of reading converge when I go over the morning newspaper: on the one hand, there is the slow progress through the news, continued sometimes on a distant page, related to other items hidden away in different sections, written in varying styles from the apparently unemotional to the blatantly ironic; on the other, the almost involuntary grasping of the ads read at a single glance, each story told within precise and limited frames, through familiar characters and symbols — not the tormented Saint Catherine or the dinner at Emmaus, but the vicissitudes of the latest Peugeot or the epiphany of Absolut Vodka.
A 1994 ad for Absolut vodka. (photo credit 7.6)
Who then were my ancestors, these distant picture-readers? The great majority, like the authors of the pictures they read, were silent, anonymous, unsung, but from those shifting crowds a few individuals can be rescued.
In October 1461, after being released from prison by the chance passing of King Louis XI through the town of Meung-sur-Loire, the poet François Villon composed a long poetic medley which he called his Testament.28 One of the pieces, a prayer to the Virgin Mary written (so he tells us) at his mother’s request, put in his mother’s mouth these words:
I am a woman poor and aged,
I know nothing at all; letters I never read;
At my parish monastery I saw A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,
And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:
One gave me fright; the other, joyfulness.29
Every article of the religious service displayed a story. The faithful would be able to follow the terrors of the Last Judgement when the priest turned his back to pray (as on this fifteenth-century Italian chasuble, opposite page) or as they passed behind the altarpiece (right, painted panels by Jorg Kandel of Biberach c. 1525). (photo credit 7.7)
Villon’s mother would have seen images of a serene and musical heaven, and a fiery, bubbling hell, and she would have known that, after her death, her soul was destined to enter one or the other. Obviously she would not, in seeing these images — however dextrously painted, however long her eyes busied themselves on the many excruciating details — have recognized in them the arduous theological arguments developed by the Church Fathers over the past fifteen centuries. She probably knew the French version of the popular Latin maxim Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo (“Few are saved, many are damned”); she probably did not know that Saint Thomas Aquinas had determined that the proportion of those to be saved was equivalent to that of Noah and his family in relation to the rest of humankind. Church sermons would have glossed some of those images, and her imagination would have done the rest.
Like Villon’s mother, thousands of people lifted their eyes to the images that adorned the church walls and later the windows, columns, pulpits, even the back of the priest’s chasuble as he was saying mass or the panels at the rear of the altar where they sat during confession, and saw in those images myriad stories or a single, never-ending story. There is no reason to think that it was otherwise with the Biblia Pauperum. But several modern scholars disagree. According to the German critic Maurus Berve, for instance, the Biblia Pauperum was “absolutely unintelligible to illiterate people”. Instead, Berve suggests that “they were probably intended for scholars or clerics who could not afford to purchase a complete Bible or who being ‘poor in spirit’ [arme in Geiste] lacked a more demanding level of education and contented themselves with these extracts.”30 Consequently the name “Biblia Pauperum” would not have meant “Bible of the Poor” but would have stood instead for Biblia Pauperum Praedicatorum, or Poor Preachers’ Bible.31
Whether these images were intended for the poor or for their preachers, it is certain that they stood open on the lectern, in front of the flock, day after day throughout the liturgical year. For the illiterate, excluded from the realm of the written word, seeing the sacred texts represented in a book in images they could recognize or “read” must have induced a feeling of belonging, of sharing with the wise and powerful the material presence of God’s word. Seeing these scenes in a book — in that almost magical object that belonged exclusively to the learned clerics and scholars of the day — was very different from seeing them in the popular decorations of the church, as they always had in the past. It was as if suddenly the holy words which had until then appeared to be the property of a few, to share or not with the flock at will, had been translated into a language that anyone, even an uninstructed woman “poor and aged” like Villon’s mother, could understand.
Reading in public fulfilled a social function in eighteenth-century France, as depicted in this contemporary engraving by Marillier. (photo credit 7.9)