THREE 
THREE Look at the pictures … that you may clearly see what may be their secret … the painter’s art has distinguished in a mass of colours and openly expressed what the letter wore within.1
Pictures can touch more deeply than words, just as some things can be said in poetry that cannot be said in prose. Images can reveal what words conceal.
The manuscript considered in this chapter is a psalter (illus. 14).2 These were made for a wide range of people – from popes and kings to merchants and their children. As the name suggests, psalters contain the Psalms and were intended for private devotion and meditation. The subject of the previous chapter was an official tome created for, and housed in, a powerful institution. The subject of this chapter is also a deluxe product, but it was pocket-sized. This particular psalter has nearly twice as many pages as the Pontifical, but it is less than one-third of its weight.3 The Pontifical would lie heavily on an ornate brass lectern to be read in a big, cold church. The Macclesfield Psalter could rest comfortably on one’s knee to be enjoyed while sitting in a walled garden or under the shade of a tree in an orchard.
The images in the Macclesfield Psalter were created by two equally skilled painters who worked together, playing off each other.4 The subject-matter of their pictures varies widely. They are all charming and graceful, but some are also funny, provocative and show an interest in emotional extremes. Today, many of the images would be considered quite improper and there were discussions about which pages might be suitable to show to the Queen when she visited the Fitzwilliam Museum in June 2005. The kind of images that might be expected in a religious book were found on its opening pages, such as venerated saints, and in decorated initials, like Death taking his victim. Some of the more unexpected images include an armed knight confronting a giant snail and a man terrified by a flying flatfish.
14 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f190r); a cleric contemplating in, or on, the margins.
Many of the marginal images, however, defy description – in fact, one art historian rather dismissively called this type of image ‘nondescript’.5 They are images of strange, contorted hybrids assembled from human, animal and plant forms. Many of them are rude and some were obviously too much for one past owner, who censored them by scratching off the offending parts. For example, judging from the now bare patch of velum, King David’s naked fool once sported a sizeable erection. The hybrid creatures are the product of a close observation of nature, combined with what seems like a fevered imagination or, more accurately, two fevered imaginations in friendly competition. It goes without saying that the psalter’s imagery is not restricted to biblical themes but hints at everyday experience, folk tales and classical themes as well as topical controversies that allow it to be dated to around 1335.6 But who on earth might have wanted such a motley collection of images?
The identities of the Macclesfield Psalter’s two painters and patron are not known. The patron might have been the young man who is painted, kneeling in prayer, towards the end of the manuscript. The patron was probably receiving spiritual guidance from a Dominican friar, such as the one painted in his characteristic black-and-white habit. Clues about the patron’s possible identity come from a coat of arms, from the particular style of worship implied in the text, from the choice of depicted saints (including name saints and locally venerated saints, for example) and even the choice of animals, such as the numerous rabbits. All that is known is that they were from Norfolk, guided by Dominicans, possibly about to enter the Church and maybe connected to the earls of Arundel or Warenne. (This potentially connects the Psalter with the previous chapter’s Metz Pontifical because the Earl of Warenne married Joan de Bar, a relative of Bishop Renaud de Bar.) But it is practically certain that the manuscript was illuminated in a workshop in Norwich, Norfolk’s first city and, throughout the Middle Ages, England’s second city.7
No one knows how long the Psalter stayed with the first owner or in his or her family. Examination of the manuscript under ultraviolet light reveals erased inscriptions suggesting that, in the fifteenth century, it was owned by a Sister Barbara. Later still, it was owned by Anthony Watson, Bishop of Chichester between 1596 and 1605, and John Smeaton, both of whom added their names. It was in the collection of the earls of Macclesfield by 1860.8
The circumstances surrounding the creation of the Macclesfield Psalter were quite different from those surrounding the Metz Pontifical. The Pontifical was designed to fit into a strict Church hierarchy. The Psalter, on the other hand, was made for a much more relaxed community, one on the outer fringes of Edward III’s court and characterized by remarkable social fluidity.9 Indeed, that social fluidity is reflected in the way the Psalter was painted. Unlike the Pontifical’s images, most of which were tidily arranged through the text in neat rectangular boxes, it seems that the Psalter’s images refuse to stay in their place. Most of them look anarchically scattered across the page, emerging from decorated letters, running along the left edge or across the bottom.
In fact, they were just as carefully arranged as the images in the Pontifical but were purposefully informal. They provide a commentary that is sometimes so radically unexpected that they challenge the reader to return to the text again and again in order to try to reconcile word and image.10
Marginalia – images in the margins – are not restricted to private books and the Pontifical had them, although they were not nearly as wild as the Psalter’s. The Psalter’s images may verge on the outrageous because they are the work of two painters vying to outdo each other with their bizarre inventions. They may have been in-jokes between two painters, but they were painted at the patron’s considerable expense and they would not have been tolerated if they had not been part of an already well-established tradition of playful philosophy or serious wit.11
The Psalter’s grotesques, with bared bottoms and stuck-out tongues, are the manuscript illuminators’ equivalent of the stonemason’s gargoyles that populate the margins of churches. (Some of the same gestures can still be seen today in school playgrounds where they signal disrespect and threat.) Gargoyles play many roles: they disperse rainwater and frighten away malicious spirits, whether outside the church or within the churchgoer who needs ‘purging’ at the start of their spiritual journey. They are functional and beautiful, funny and frightening, they protect and purge; their shock value was intended to jolt idle viewers out of their complacency and to conquer fear by turning the terrifying into the merely grotesque. Above all, they harness the power of popular humour in a religious context.12
The Psalter’s imagery merges the popular and the religious to such an extent that the two become indistinguishable and many of its wonderful images are literally hybrid.13 They are very learned gags with complex cultural references, as one might expect from jokes associated with high-end luxury goods (illus. 15–17). Today, most of the finer points are lost on us, but they can be appreciated as the graphic equivalent of the highly polished literary riddles that flourished at exactly the same time in the universities, where riddles were used to engage the attention of easily distracted students and to make problem-solving memorable.
Many of the Psalter’s images could be classed as schoolboy humour, like the woman bent double, skirts lifted, staring at the reader through her bare legs, and the naked man, also bent double, with one hand on his bare bottom. In fact, nakedness, contortion and extreme contrapposto are rife.14 The female may owe something to the ancient tradition of carved Sheela-na-gigs, while the male may be an erudite play on the word lutum, or ‘dirty’, written in the adjacent Psalm.15 But, like gargoyles, such figures could be interpreted in other ways too.16 Chaucer used visual riddles, and one of his verbal riddles is identical in tone to some of the Psalter’s marginalia.17 It is worth recalling that particular riddle to see how the ludicrous and the serious, the bawdy and the refined, could cohabit quite comfortably.18
The multiple ways of reading such apparently improper images is suggested by an episode in Chaucer’s ‘The Summoner’s Tale’, in which a greedy friar visited a bedridden man who was near death. The friar spent a long time trying to extort food or money until the sick man relented and promised a gift, saying:
And you shall have it in your hand to own
On one condition and on one alone,
That you divide it equally, dear brother,
And every friar to have as much as other.
The greedy friar promised to share it equally with his twelve fellow friars. So the sick man, explaining that the gift was under the bed-clothes for safekeeping, asked the friar to reach beneath the sheets and grope behind him, whereupon ‘into that friar’s hand he blew a fart’. The outraged friar stormed out and went to the lord of the manor to complain at his treatment. The incident was related and the difficulty of the problem was discussed.
In all arithmetic you couldn’t find
… so tricky an equation …
Where every man alike should have his part
Both of the sound and savour of a fart.
Eventually, the squire suggested a solution. It involved offering the gift again on a calm day, with the friars arranged around a twelve-spoked wheel and the donor at its hub, so that ‘equally the sound of it will wend / Together with the stink, to the spoke’s end’. The friar was not amused, but the lord’s wife passed judgment and rewarded the squire, who was declared to be ‘As wise as Euclid or as Ptolemy’.19
15 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (151r); a jousting contest by a warren, the site of the encounter possibly alluding to the patron’s family name.
Chaucer implied that the problem was not beneath the greatest minds of classical science because, between them, Euclid and Ptolemy established the foundations of all Europe’s knowledge of geometry and space. By mentioning these respected authorities, Chaucer parodies science.20 But at the same time, he is true to his belief that the best ‘new science’ is found in ‘old books’ and suggests that the riddle poses a serious question: how do you divide the indivisible?21 In the case of a fart, the cartwheel and calm day hint that one answer is provided by geometry and diffusion. Anyone who did not have what Shakespeare’s Duke Vincentio called ‘a stubborn soul / That apprehends no further than this world’ would have recognized that the riddle also had an otherworldly meaning.22 While the fart joke is quintessentially earthy, it points towards the heavenly – emanationist – problem of how an indivisible God can divide Himself. How can that which transcends all things also be immanent within all things?
Lists of similarly ludicrous and serious riddles are scattered through numerous surviving manuscripts that cover legal, mathematical, astronomical, grammatical and rhetorical exercises. They are also in the Secretum philosophorum, which circulated around England in many copies at the time the Psalter was being painted and includes experiments, tricks, games and deceptions.23 Some copies of the Secretum gave solutions to their riddles. For example, one – ‘Half the moon, the whole sun and a quarter of a wheel is all God wants of you’ – had a graphic solution. Half the moon is the letter ‘C’, the whole sun is the letter ‘O’ and quarter of a wheel (rota, in Latin) is the letter ‘R’. God requires our cor; He wants our hearts.24 The riddle’s solution was not difficult to those insiders who knew the code’s key, but it was fun to work out and it was a way of keeping things secret from outsiders if wanted.
16 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (152r); the joust’s tragic consequence.
Chaucer’s ‘divided fart’ riddle has, among others, a scientific meaning, and the meaning of the Secretum’s ‘half-moon’ riddle is spiritual, but riddles could also have political meanings. For example, the poem Piers Plowman included variants on the ‘half-moon’ riddle as well as politically subversive riddles that were subtly changed in a revised version that followed the rebellion against Richard II in 1381. The author, William Langland, used riddles to engage different audiences, to encourage different ways of thinking and to simultaneously include one group while excluding another. As the political climate changed, aligning and alienating factions brought changing benefits and dangers, hence the expedient poet changed his jokes.25
It is probable that the Psalter’s unknown painters, like Chaucer and Langland, embedded several levels of meaning into their strange riddle-like creations. The painters were visited by their muse and they aimed to ‘amuse’ in as many ways as possible. Indeed, one of their most personal amusements lay hidden in their slightly odd choice of materials. Luckily, because of its recent history, more is known about the Psalter’s pigments than is known about the materials in most other manuscripts (illus. 18).
17 Macclesfield Psalter, 15r, detail; reconciliation after the joust.
18 Francesca Rosi, a member of the seven-strong MOLAB team of chemists, preparing to identify pigments in the Macclesfield Psalter as part of a pop-up laboratory in the Founder’s Library, Fitzwilliam Museum.
Rosi is carefully positioning an analytical probe approximately 1 mm away from the parchment’s surface, taking advantage of the manuscript’s removal from its non-original binding.
Under the auspices of EU-ARTECH (a project of the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Community), MOLAB specializes in the analysis of works of art and is run by Bruno Brunetti of the University of Perugia. He was convinced that investigating the Psalter would be worthwhile, so he arranged a team of chemists to come over from Italy to examine it, while I found a team of conservators to supervise the work. Over three action-packed days, the museum’s manuscript curator, Stella Panayotova, and I worked with conservators and chemists, looking at hundreds of illuminations with a dozen different machines. The scientific techniques we employed were all non-destructive so no samples were taken but, by combining the results of all the different tests, we were able to identify most of the artists’ materials.
For the entire twentieth century, the Psalter lay overlooked in the library of Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire. When it appeared on the market, it was hailed as ‘the most important discovery of any English illuminated manuscript in living memory’.26 It was auctioned in 2004 and sold to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but the British Secretary of State for Culture blocked the sale. A hurried public appeal and contributions from a number of charitable bodies allowed it to remain in England and, indeed, return to East Anglia:27 when the manuscript arrived at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, it was conserved. This was a process that involved taking the manuscript out of its early eighteenth-century binding and separating it into 252 leaves.
The manuscript was calfskin, pared so thin that it was almost transparent in places. The text was written – with a quill, probably made from a goose or swan feather – using iron gall ink for the black letters and vermilion for the red letters. The list of pigments found in the illuminations contained nothing that might seem out of place in a Norwich workshop of around 1335.
The illuminations contained a carbon black that was almost certainly ground-up charcoal. It was probably made from willow, although it is usually called ‘vine black’ in artists’ manuals. They also contained lead white and chalk, a common East Anglian rock. The non-destructive methods of analysis we used could not determine exactly where the Psalter’s chalk came from, but an extensive grid of medieval tunnels run through the chalk under Norwich.28 The rich blues were provided by high-grade azurite, the ‘terrestrial’ blue of the previous chapter. Some dull blues may also have been provided by indigo, a plant-based colour that was mainly used to dye cloth. One green colour was provided by a synthetic copper pigment that was made in the same way as lead white, with green rust scraped off copper metal left for a month under horse manure.29 Another green, ‘sap green’, was extracted from buckthorn berries, more commonly used as a laxative drug.30 There were several different reds. The transparent ones were provided by kermes and madder. Kermes was extracted from dried insects imported from the south of France.31 Madder, for its part, was extracted from the roots of a local plant of the same name.32 Both were widely used to dye cloth and both were absorbed onto a synthetic colourless pigment called ‘alum’, which was manufactured at enormous expense from a rock mined in Turkey.33 The opaque reds were provided by red lead, which was made from roasting lead white, and by earths.34 The red earth pigments may have been mined locally, or they may have been dug up as yellow earths and burned to change their colour.35 Saffron, which may also have grown locally, provided another yellow. Finally, there was a synthetic golden pigment called ‘mosaic gold’, as well as pure, beaten gold leaf.
The materials that the painters used were typical for a workshop equipped to supply luxury manuscripts to discerning clients. At first glance, all the intense analytical activity seemed to offer no surprises. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that I was missing something.
Some of the Psalter’s colours were extracted from animals (kermes red), some from vegetables (vine black), some from minerals (the earths) and some were artificial (lead white). Some came from far afield (gold) and some were local (the chalk). Many of the homegrown colours had local significance economically, which accounts for how someone in East Anglia could afford to commission a unique personal book with real beaten gold on almost every page. Briefly looking at just one of those local colours, saffron, shows how the Psalter’s materials were an integral part of life in East Anglia.
Although saffron occurs in many recipes by artists – for example, with lemon juice when painting verdigris and with fig-tree sap when gilding parchment –the Psalter was the first place I had seen it identified.36 Saffron was used as a spice and as a drug and is a rich, transparent yellow made from the dried stigmas of crocus flowers. It stains even more strongly than the yellow pollen accidentally brushed off lilies. The dried stigmas were worth their weight in gold, just like ultramarine, which suggests that the painter’s palette was not determined by cost.
Crocus stigmas have been collected for over 3,000 years.37 William Harrison described the cultivation of saffron in England in the sixteenth century.38 In the Middle Ages, it became so important in East Anglia that it gave its name to a town, Saffron Walden. In fact, when the Psalter was being painted, the town was still called ‘Chepyng Walden’, but in time the flower became so important that the town changed its name. Acknowledging the plant’s significance, the arrival of Saffron Walden’s first ever crocus bulb was celebrated in legend. Some versions put the date of saffron’s arrival in England as during the reign of Edward III, at the time the Psalter was being painted. According to Richard Hakluyt, the first bulbs were smuggled out of Iran by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land who hid them in hollowed-out staves.39
It must be said that this story might not be completely true, as it is remarkably similar to the story about how monks brought silkworms to the West.40 It is also comparable to a trick allegedly played by fraudulent alchemists, who appeared to make silver or gold by stirring a hot liquid with a hollow stick, filled with powdered metal and sealed at the bottom with wax.41 These stories all follow the same pattern – the treasure is hidden in a stick – and this is exactly how Prometheus stole fire (and with it, all the arts and sciences42) from the gods.43 Prometheus, whose name means ‘forethought’, hid fire in the hollow stalk of a giant fennel, which has a dry pith protected from the wind that can act like a slow-burning taper. It is an eminently practical means of carrying fire.44 According to these stories, mankind’s fire, the alchemist’s silver, the West’s silk and England’s saffron were all won by deceit. But similar stories also describe the origins of freely given gifts, like the Christmas presents that arrive in front of the hearth at the bottom of the chimney.45 They all involve finding treasure at the bottom of a hollow vertical axis that symbolizes the connection between different worlds. The stories hint at the divine origin of riches in general and the value of saffron in particular. They also reinforce the numerous intricate connections between practical and spiritual matters demonstrated by the use of two blues in the Metz Pontifical.
So, the Psalter’s saffron may or may not have been local. It could have been extracted from flowers grown in Iran or in Chepyng Walden, to become Saffron Walden. But wherever it came from, it was a suitable pigment to glorify the Psalms, since it came – directly or indirectly – from the Holy Land, where it was celebrated, as one of the ‘chief spices’, in the Song of Songs.46 Its enthusiastic adoption in England, as a drug, spice and dye, was recognized by Chaucer who suggested that it ‘sweetened the pill’ of spiritual truths, and his Pardoner claimed to
put a saffron tinge upon my preaching,
[To] stir devotion with a spice of teaching.47
Like the ingredients of lead white, most of the Psalter’s materials were intimately linked to people’s livelihoods in the local community. The transparent red colours, kermes and madder, for example, were crucial to the textile trade that formed Norwich’s economic heart and made it the richest city in England after London until the mid-eighteenth century.48 Madder – along with kermes and cochineal – was used to dye local cloth. The craft districts in medieval Norwich were all clustered together in narrow streets around the cathedral, castle, market and river. The painters’ workshop was almost certainly in St George Tombland, just west of the cathedral and only a couple of minutes’ walk from St John Maddermarket, where a church survives to this day bearing witness to the dyers’ use of the plant.49
The deep-red dye was first extracted from roots of madder plants. At the same time, sheep were raised and shorn, wool was spun and woven, and cloth was cut and sewn to make clothes that were then dyed. Fragments of cloth cut from hems and seams, together with loose fibres produced by surface-finishing treatments, were collected and boiled in lye to extract the precious pigment, which was then bound with alum and used by painters. The livelihoods of Norfolk’s farmers and Norwich’s weavers, seamstresses and dyers were intimately connected to the Psalter’s painters through the flow of materials and a web of craft mysteries (illus. 19).
Following the scientific analysis, I found it satisfying to discover that the red colour of the Psalter’s painted drapery was actually extracted from the offcuts of real red drapery. The people who appreciated the Psalter’s illuminations would have known that recycling their own clothes provided colour for the saint’s clothes.
The patron and the painters, their families, friends and neighbours would all have enjoyed the Psalter’s colours in their clothes, cosmetics, foods and medicines. In fact, the patron was only able to commission such a luxurious manuscript because, directly or indirectly, his or her family actually made their money from the rich materials that went into the manuscript. After considering the painters’ materials in the light of medieval East Anglia life, slowly it dawned on me what I had missed about the results of the Psalter’s analysis. The most interesting thing about the list of materials in the Psalter’s illuminations was not what the painters used, but what they did not use. What I had missed was the fact that some pigments were missing.
There was no ultramarine – all the rich blues are azurite. There was no vermilion – even though vermilion was used to paint the ‘red letter days’ of the calendar and other parts in the text. There was also no powdered shell gold – even though plenty of leaf gold was used in the workshop and there is absolutely no doubt that the painters would have made shell gold by recycling the gold leaf offcuts. In other words, there were colours that the painters had in their workshop that were not used on a very prestigious commission. The ultramarine was substituted by azurite, vermilion was substituted by red earths and shell gold was substituted by mosaic gold, the synthetic gold of Moses, even though such substitutions were prohibited by guild regulations.50
However, the painters’ decisions about which materials to use do not appear to be motivated by fraud. The blue for blue, red for red and gold for gold swaps seem to be quite open. The absence of some prestigious pigments in the Psalter was not due to cost-cutting. After all, the artists used plenty of very expensive pigments – like saffron, pure gold and red dyes on alum – and they did not use the expensive ones on important parts and cheaper ones in less important parts, like the Pontifical’s painter. Also, the extraordinarily detailed painting shows absolutely no sign of being rushed. The Psalter did not come off a production line. It was a labour of love.
An enormous range of colours was available in Norwich and the painters almost certainly had access to everything they wanted – a rich patron would probably provide the expensive materials. They just chose not to use some. Indeed, the absence of ultramarine, vermilion and shell gold does not compromise the dazzling visual effect. The azurite is as deep and rich as ultramarine, the earths are as brilliant as vermilion and the alchemical gold of Moses still looks like real powdered gold almost 700 years after it was applied. You would never guess by looking at the pictures but it is almost as if the illuminators wanted to make their job more difficult. The Psalter may have been a labour of love, but the painters still had to earn a living, so why they wanted to make their task trickier is a riddle. And one possible solution to that riddle can be found by returning to the marginalia.
19 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f20v); the Psalter’s ‘magician’ photographed under visible and ultraviolet light. The purple colour of the hat was made with a mixture that included madder deposited on to colourless alum. The dyestuff extracted from the roots of the madder plant fluoresces in UV light while the alternative transparent reds – cochineal, kermes and lac, all derived from insects – do not and would look black in UV. This test allowed the red pigment to be identified (in combination with XRF, another non-sampling technique) without touching the manuscript.
‘Politically incorrect’ to the modern eye, sex and toilet humour might initially seem to have little to do with religious devotion, yet sacred texts often have very explicit images. The modern reader might find Psalms and fart jokes to be strange bedfellows, but Chaucer obviously felt comfortable with the combination and, presumably, so too did the Psalter’s patron and its painters.
Some of the apparently nonsensical images had quite easily identifiable meanings. For example, the Psalms are rich in poetic imagery, and the marginal images sometimes follow the text quite literally, so a picture of the Tree of Jesse often accompanied Psalm I, which states that the blessed ‘shall be like a tree planted by the river’. Sometimes the marginal images are visual puns on words in the accompanying text, which encourage the reader to dwell on the text. Some figures literally point or peer at parts of the text. Sometimes the images act like catchwords to introduce the first line of the next page, encouraging the reader to turn the page rather than put the book down.51
Other marginal images refer to current theological debates – such as whether one could see God’s face at the moment of death, or whether one had to wait until the Last Judgement.52 Given the large number of bare bottoms, some images may engage in other contemporary debates that were less high-minded – such as widespread gossip about the sexual inclinations of Edward II, who died in 1327, a few years before the Psalter was commissioned.53
Such topical references doubtless sharpened the original reader’s experience of the Psalms, but most of the images’ power is lost on us. Folk tales, however, endure and it is clear that the fox preaching to the cockerel and stealing the goose are episodes from the popular tales of Reynard, the trickster fox. Cocks and foxes populate the Psalter’s margins and Chaucer also included a story about a flattering fox and a vain cock (as well as a hen who foolishly dismissed the significance of dreams) in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’. Like the fart joke, Chaucer clearly intended the story to be taken seriously. He ended it saying:
And if you think my story is absurd,
A foolish trifle of a beast and a bird,
A fable of a fox, a cock and a hen,
Then take hold of the moral, gentlemen
… take the grain and let the chaff be still
And, gracious Father, if it be thy will
As saith my Saviour, make us all good men,
And bring us to His heavenly bliss, Amen.54
Chaucer explicitly warns his reader not to dismiss the strange, but to ‘give it welcome’, as Hamlet was to urge several centuries later. No matter how ‘absurd’ or ‘foolish’ the clues may be, Chaucer suggested that their solution could promise ‘heavenly bliss’.55 Following the long tradition of fables, absurd contortions, inversions and role reversals could reflect raising the meek and humbling the mighty.
Reynard the fox is still around (in many forms, including the swash-buckling Zorro) and the dangers of flattery and vanity are still very much alive. Similarly, the meanings of many other images remain accessible. The woman riding on the back of a naked old man, for example, illustrates a story about Phyllis (Alexander the Great’s concubine) and Aristotle (Alexander the Great’s teacher). In this story, Phyllis overheard Aristotle warning Alexander about the dangers of women. She was offended and, in return for sex, tricked Aristotle into giving her a ride in front of Alexander (illus. 20). Perhaps surprisingly, the story did not end in tears.56
The meanings of most of the images, however, are not obvious. The majority are of hybrids or grotesques and the Psalter is literally swarming with them, starting as they mean to carry on (illus. 21–22). The very first is a man with birds’ legs and a second face on his bottom. Then comes an ape-headed woman wearing a turban and riding a creature that is half-duck, half-donkey. The very last, ridden by a man with an astrolabe, has a head like a stork and the hind legs of a lion with a blue tail that turns into a spiral of foliage. Some historians, possibly still under the influence of the 1960s, have attributed such monstrous images to painters who ate grain infected by ergot, a hallucinogen like LSD. I think this is unlikely.
Creatures with two or three heads, with twisted bodies or no bodies, with diverse arms, legs or wings and with vegetation sprouting from noses, mouths or tails are obviously monsters. Their name comes from the Latin verb monstrum, ‘to show’, (as in ‘demonstrate’) so monsters were signposts. Sometimes they point towards the text; sometimes they converse with themselves and sometimes they converse with others. Some are confronted by humans. They can look happy, sad, calm, agitated or perhaps, not surprisingly, confused. Some are fully dressed, some are only partially clad and many are naked. Some play musical instruments, others wield weapons. Some are mainly human, others mainly animal or bird; some are credible, if bizarre, organisms and some are obviously unviable. They make the creatures that populate medieval bestiaries – like unicorns, griffins and dragons – look like familiar domesticated creatures.
20 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f233v); Phyllis rides Aristotle.
The clue that the painters offer to their riddle-like creatures is the way they populate the Psalter. They rub shoulders with farmyard animals, with people from the classics and folk tales and with saints. They are distributed through the manuscript in a manner that makes them seem almost mundane. They are not conveniently segregated, like phantoms from some bad dream or Frankenstein-like creatures from some genetic experiment. The hybrids are not ‘outsiders’, shunned by law-abiding citizens who make up the ‘insiders’.
The monstrous hybrids are undeniably strange, but their creators – the two playful painters – were fully aware that even the apparently familiar could be strange. One example of ‘familiar strangeness’ was provided by the very pigments they used, after all, the painters knew that their white pigment came from a black metal and could, in time, turn black again. Their black pigments came from white vine and ivory, which could, if burned further, turn into white ashes. The painters’ world was not ‘black and white’. It was not even fixed shades of grey. It did not fit into cut-and-dried categories, because, in their world, everything could change and everything coexisted.
So, if even black and white were not completely separate, then the monstrous and the civilized were not completely separate either. From their everyday dealings in Norwich, the patron and painters would have known that the actions of apparently civilized businessmen and politicians could have monstrous consequences. From their knowledge of parables and myths, they also knew that the monstrously strange had a familiarly civilized side. For example, the Cyclops Polyphemus – who imprisoned Odysseus and his companions and ate them two by two until blinded by a stake in the eye – was obviously a monster, but he was also a sensitive shepherd and skilled cheesemaker,57 and was broken-hearted after being hit by one of Cupid’s lead-tipped arrows.58
21 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f148r); a man confronts a hybrid creature constructed from, and armed with, decorative elements.
The monstrous hybrids are not separate from the everyday. They are completely integrated within the Psalter’s pages and they are merely one end of a continuum that stretches all the way to Christ in Judgment, via the praying young man and his Dominican adviser. For the two unknown painters, monsters were just part of the mix. They knew that the richer the mix in creation, the more it imitated the inexhaustible richness of the Creator, even if some of the mix seems strange. Their marginal combinations of saints and sinners, mortals and monsters seem to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas, who said that while angels may be better than stones, it does not follow that two angels are better than one angel and one stone.59
The painters’ hybrid creations were outwardly strange but we are not in a position to pass judgment on them, and some parts of them might even be familiar. In fact, precisely because they were so outwardly unbelievable, whatever might be believable about them must be hidden within.60
22 Macclesfield Psalter, detail (f64v); a three-headed hybrid.
The wildly proliferating marginal images hint at one possible reason for the Psalter’s oddly curtailed list of pigments. If there is a method in the painters’ madness, then it is the same for both the monsters and the materials that made them. They are both jokes, or, more accurately, riddles. Riddles are in-jokes which sort those ‘in the know’ from those who ‘don’t get it’, so the riddle of the painters’ excluded materials was an extremely exclusive joke. And if we want to share in their joke, we need to try to get into their shoes.
The Psalter’s two painters were sharing a very private joke. But the serious side of medieval jokes suggests that they were also engaging in a very personal meditation. In fact, although it might seem strange to the modern mind, the painters’ materials and monstrous marginalia were both a meditation and a joke.61 Together, the choice of pigments and the hybrid creatures are like Zen koans, so ‘getting the joke’ is like a flash of satori, or spiritual illumination.62 Hugh of St Victor’s idea of meditation was slightly different from a Zen master’s, but he also aimed for lightheartedness. Hugh defined meditation as
a regular period of deliberate thought … not at all bound by … rules or precepts [that] delights to run freely … touching on now these, now those connections … [and is] the greatest pleasure and amusement.63
In terms of the Greek concept of xenia, or hospitality, what marks crossing the border from a state of spiritual ignorance (suffered by the outsiders who do not get the joke) to a state of spiritual insight (enjoyed by the insiders who do get it) is laughter or a release of breath, which is synonymous with spirit. It is as if, 50 years before Chaucer, the painters challenged the Psalter’s reader with their strange creatures, saying do not ‘think my pictures are absurd / Foolish trifles of beast and bird’. (‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’). Like Chaucer, they knew that their emotionally charged creations had the potential to transport the viewer to ‘heavenly bliss’. When looking at the Psalter, readers had a choice: they could either dismiss the very obviously weird hybrids as ludicrous or contemplate them as pointers towards the transcendent (and those who knew that the word ‘weird’ meant ‘fateful’ would not dismiss the hybrids).
However, the use of materials was a different story. The patron would have known that ultramarine, vermilion and shell gold had been laid aside but the painters’ skill was such that their secret died with them. Until a group of Italian chemists analysed the artists’ materials, nobody was aware of their strange selection of pigments. The painters and patron probably curtailed their choice of pigments just for their own entertainment. Indeed, given the coexistence of the serious and ludicrous, precluding some pigments was both a trivial and a profound matter.
From a trivial point of view, restricting the palette was a bit like painting with one hand tied behind your back. It is something that only an expert would do, to test or stretch themselves. With two painters working on the same manuscript, they were also testing each other’s skills, sparring like sportsmen or sportswomen at the top of their game. From that perspective, I think it is fair to say that the painters passed their self-imposed test. However, a more profound solution to the riddle of their restricted palette becomes apparent only when their task is approached in a more philosophical manner.
The two painters obviously knew how to paint and, to them, painting meant much more than being able to mix colours and put brush to parchment. Painting was a business in the commercial world, a science in the technical world and a vocation in the spiritual world. Great paintings happened only when the commercial, technical and spiritual worlds were each given their due. So, what is the spiritual significance of not using some of the materials that were available in the workshop?
For the Psalter’s painters, following in the footsteps of St Luke, the choice of pigments was part of an activity that reflected both Nature and God. The painters’ understanding of Nature would have been influenced by Aristotle, whose teaching provided a general framework for understanding how change occurs in the world. His explanation of what caused things to happen was directed at the changes that occurred in Nature, but he illustrated the idea with an example of a change that occurred in Art.
Aristotle defined four different things that were all necessary in order to change things in the world. They are: the ‘material cause’, ‘efficient cause’, ‘formal cause’ and ‘final cause’.64 He illustrated them by showing how a piece of stone turns into a statue. The piece of stone from the quarry is the statue’s material cause. The sculptor is the statue’s efficient cause. The idea in the sculptor’s head is its formal cause. The patron’s wishes, meanwhile, are its final cause. The relationship between the causes is hierarchical, and the final cause (the patron’s wish) is the most important. This determines the formal cause (a commission), which in turn determines the efficient cause (the artist) and the least important cause is the material, as chosen by the artist.
The four causes are a way of approaching a work of art’s creation that takes into account much more than simply understanding how pigments were made or purified. For example, a black metal might have the potential to turn into a white powder, but it only actually happens if someone chooses to put lead under horse manure for a month. And that only happens if a painter wants a pure white pigment so that he mights fulfil a patron’s wishes. Aristotle’s four causes account for how something that might happen in theory turns into something that actually does happen in practice. They are not like the modern idea of causes – actions with inevitable consequences played out by passive things – they are like the preconditions required in order for an autonomous thing to come into being or to change of its own volition. (And the reason something comes into being or changes is its desire to fulfil its potential and contribute actively to the perfection of the universe.65)
So, in practice, if East Anglia had not been a very wealthy region in the fourteenth century, then gold, saffron and the other expensive materials would not have been found in Norwich. In practice, if a patron did not want a rich manuscript, then they could have found other uses for the expensive ingredients. Money was a large part of the Psalter’s final cause. Nevertheless, disposable income can be disposed of in many ways (a single manuscript could cost as much as a house or a farm).66 So what caused it to turn into a Psalter rather than something else? The patron’s choices were obviously influenced by the spiritual world of fourteenth-century East Anglia.
The patron and the painters would have discussed how the Psalter should be illustrated. They specified a budget that allowed for many luxurious images in the margins, and – although there is no written evidence – they must have discussed the general tone of the images, broadly outlining acceptable themes or degrees of obscenity. The patron typically also specified what materials the painters should use – the budget for gold leaf, for example, would have been significant. We cannot know exactly who made the decision to miss out some pigments. It could have been the patron, but I think that it is more likely to have been the painters, probably in discussion with the patron and the Dominican adviser. All that we can know is that these decisions were made, because the manuscript exists with these particular images, not with other possible images, and with a strangely limited range of pigments.
Now, if the exact details of the images and palette were not specified by the person who paid for the work, then that person was not the Psalter’s only ‘final cause’. The two painters had the freedom to make their own decisions, so they were co-patrons of the work. In fact, the patron almost certainly chose these two painters precisely because he or she knew and appreciated their particular predilections. So the Psalter’s final cause could be said to be combination of circumstances – established economic and spiritual infrastructures, a sufficient disposable income, a patron’s wishes and the painters’ reputations.
The Psalter’s formal cause was the idea or ‘blueprint’ for the manuscript. In some respects, this was very well defined – for example, the exact wording of the Psalms was quite fixed. In other respects, the blueprint was less defined so there was more room for manoeuvre. The calendar, for instance, reflected local feasts and holidays. The images themselves were relatively unrestrained and the painters seem to have had complete freedom in how they used their pigments. The Psalter’s efficient causes were those who prepared the pigments and parchment: the scribe and the two painters, the people who did the work. Lastly, its material cause is the list of ingredients that the Italian chemists identified by scientific analysis – the that stuff the artists worked with.
The four causes explain why the Psalter exists at all, and they also suggest where to look for a solution to the riddle of the painters’ restricted palette. It cannot be found in the Psalter’s final cause (the patron) nor can it be found in the Psalter’s efficient cause (the painters). The patron was from a rich and powerful Norfolk family, but their exact identity is still unknown and the painters are also unknown. Today, the fact that the patron and painters are anonymous might frustrate modern preoccupations with personalities. Yet even without knowing the people involved, the physical manuscript is not an entirely impersonal object because, together, the patron and painters (the final and efficient causes) were really just the Psalter’s midwife. The two Aristotelian causes that remain, the ideas and the pigments (the formal and material causes), could be considered to be the Psalter’s true parents.
The Psalter’s formal cause, or the idea behind the manuscript, was determined by the patron who, as the word suggests, was its ‘paternal’ influence. Of course, just as the patron’s function could be embodied in the painter, they could also be female. The ingredients in the Psalter, or its ‘material’ cause, were, as the word suggests, the ‘maternal’ influence. According to the traditional view, the finished work was the child of a masculine, in-forming idea and feminine, in-formed, ingredients. The modern eye has got used to celebrating forms – the father’s influence – and ignoring the matter, the mother – that carries them. We go to the cinema to appreciate flickering coloured shadows, not the still, white screen.67 But without the screen there would be no movie, without paper, no photos or printed word, and without plastic and metal, no computer-generated imagery.68
However, unlike most of us, the Psalter’s two painters did not overlook the feminine aspect of the child they helped deliver. They knew that each material had its own qualities and they used their materials accordingly, just like the Pontifical’s painter who distinguished between celestial and terrestrial blues. The Psalter’s painters’ concern for the appropriate use of matter – a respectful acknowledgement of the contribution made by the manuscript’s mother – is shown by their use of mosaic gold, for example. There is not a shadow of a doubt that powdered shell gold was available in the artists’ workshop, yet they chose to use mosaic gold instead. At first glance, the naked eye might confuse alchemical mosaic gold and natural powdered shell gold, but the way artists switched between the two was not arbitrary. Although mosaic gold and shell gold look similar – like high-grade azurite and ultramarine – they are very different materials. One is ‘true gold’, whereas the other is merely the ‘likeness of gold’. In the third century, an Alexandrian, Origen, said
true gold denotes things incorporeal, unseen and spiritual … the likeness of gold, in which is not the Truth itself but only the Truth’s shadow, denotes things bodily and visible.69
The painters used ‘true gold’ to decorate the Psalter because the word ‘decorate’ means ‘to honour’ and is still used in that sense when talking about decorating people.70 So true gold ‘honours’ the Psalms, and true gold was also used to depict heaven and Christ, which are ‘things incorporeal, unseen and spiritual’. However, mosaic gold, which is just ‘the likeness of gold’, was used to depict St John the Baptist’s ‘bodily and visible’ fur. Now, if Christ is ‘the Truth itself’, then St John the Baptist is ‘only the Truth’s shadow’. It is also entirely appropriate that a figure who bridges the Old and the New Testaments should be depicted in a material that acknowledges that difference. It is also appropriate that the ‘likeness of gold’, mosaic gold, was an alchemical pigment attributed to Moses, a legendary Old Testament father of alchemy. As a fabricated alchemical hybrid (of tin, sulphur, quicksilver and sal ammoniac), mosaic gold is also appropriate for the marginal creatures which are, of course, also fabricated hybrids.71
Such playfully, or philosophically, subtle use of materials suggests that the Psalter’s two painters were just as conscientious as the Pontifical’s painter. Mosaic gold shows that they knew and respected their materials. So their deliberately limited palette is a calculated statement about matter, ‘the mother of the work’.
For the Psalter’s Dominican-influenced painters, matter had a ‘nature that existed metaphysically beyond what can be seen and physically weighed.’72 Yet whatever their rather obscure statements about matter – the work’s ‘mother’ – might mean, they become clearer when their much more obvious comments on form – the work’s ‘father’ – are revisited. Luckily for us, nearly 700 years after it was painted, it is easier to appreciate the Psalter’s form than its matter.73 No expensive equipment or chemists are required. All that is needed are eyes to see.
The most obvious part of the Psalter’s visual form is its strange collection of everyday and hybrid creatures. Appreciating the form simply involves recognizing that the painters wanted the reader to be able to revel in a riot of possibilities, whether apparently normal or abnormal. The sheer exuberant variety of animal, vegetable, mineral and monstrous decoration suggests a limitless imagination.
In fact, the painters’ generosity with their ideas means that their work can reward many different interpretations, in keeping with the express purpose of marginal images. They were, after all, intended to act as springboards for meditations in the manner of Hugh of St Victor. For example, if the Psalter was read in a sunny orchard, the reader may even have been surrounded by abnormalities not unlike the many-headed, vegetation-sprouting hybrids in the manuscript’s margins. Such very real abnormalities could be found in the orchard; a text written in 1305 said it was ‘a great beauty and pleasure to have in one’s garden trees variously and marvellously grafted, and many different fruits growing on a single tree.’74 Grafting trees was far from merely utilitarian – it alluded to the multiple branches of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Grafting also acknowledged that there was a single matter that, or mother who, was capable of adopting many faces – a vegetable analogue of lead white’s mineral demonstration. The different fruits on one tree were a cosmological reflection of the theological statement that ‘we, though many, are one body.’75 Looking at pictures of several-headed beasts in the shade of a several-fruited tree would remind the reader that the matter underlying appearances was essentially one, which was why the painters could turn black into white or alchemically transmute a base metal (tin) into a (mosaic) gold.
If the marginalia was open to multiple interpretations, then so too was the text (a later chapter will acknowledge the four different readings that Dante gave to a single Psalm). However, multiple interpretations can be unsettling, and some later readers obviously wished that there had been a limit to the painters’ imaginations. Patches of scraped-off paint show that later owners felt that the painters simply went too far and some of their images transgressed the limits of decorum.
Thus, looking at the formal and material causes together, the ‘father of the work’ purposefully strayed beyond limits, while the ‘mother of the work’ purposefully stayed within limits. The painters could have chosen not to use ultramarine, vermilion or shell gold to reinforce the contrast between the Psalter’s mother and its father – one was obviously restricted, while the other was completely unrestrained. But why should the painters want to be unnecessarily constrained with their ingredients while throwing all caution to the wind with their ideas?
One key to the riddle was given over 1,000 years before the painters were even born. It is found in a description of the doors to the Palace of the Sun and it was written by a glittering star of Rome’s literary scene who ended his days languishing by the Black Sea, exiled for committing some unknown indiscretion. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid said that the doors to the Palace of the Sun showed the seas, the earth and the heavens, complete with gods, men and animals, all carved out of pure silver. However, he said that their ‘workmanship was even more wonderful than their material’.76 And his phrase echoed down the centuries.
Ovid described the doors to the Palace of the Sun as someone who had no role in their creation. The doors were made for Apollo by Vulcan and neither the patron nor the artist left any comment on the work. As the final and the efficient causes, they both assumed that the work – a combination of formal and material causes – spoke for itself. So the Psalter’s patron and painters’ silence had good mythical precedent. However, a few painters – like Theophilus and Cennini – did choose to write, and so too did an even smaller number of patrons. A decade or so after Theophilus wrote his manual in the 1120s, one patron wrote a very rare account of commissioning works of art.
This rare patron and author had humble origins. He was born in 1081 to relatively lowly parents and entered into a monastic way of life at the age of nine or ten. At school, he rubbed shoulders with the sons of noblemen and princes and came to consider himself the Church’s adopted son. He poured all his energies into the Church and eventually became the Abbot of St Denis, Paris, which was the burial place of French kings and one of the most important churches in France. Abbot Suger described himself as a ‘beggar lifted up from a dunghill’,77 but became a tireless and powerful diplomat, a friend and adviser of kings.78
Despite his political activities, Abbot Suger did not neglect the Christian Church that had taken him in as a child. He completely rebuilt St Denis, endowing enormous resources on its expansion and embellishment while living in a small, narrow cell, like all the other monks, right up to his death in 1151. He may have had very modest personal requirements, but he wanted the world to know about his achievements, which is why, unusually, he wrote about his role as a patron of the arts.79 For the purposes of this book – with its assumptions of well-informed painters and patrons – it is important to note that Suger was not a great scholar. His attitude to art was mainly informed by his everyday experience of public worship.80
Like the sun god Apollo, Suger knew that his home needed an impressive door. In the year 1140, he consecrated new cast-bronze and gilded doors for the church and had a poem inscribed on them in copper-gilt letters. The poem starts:
Whoever thou art, if thou seekest to extol the glory of these doors,
Marvel not at the gold and the expense but at the craftsmanship of the work.81
Therefore, despite not being a scholar, Suger might have known his Metamorphoses. And elsewhere, justifying the ‘lavish sumptuousness’ of gold-work by ‘barbarian artists’, he observed that ‘certain people might be able to say “The workmanship surpassed the material.”’82 In other words, Suger was not alone in knowing the phrase and Ovid’s comparison of workmanship and materials seems to have been a common yardstick for judging art. Exactly the same phrase was used 100 years later by Pope Innocent IV, and again, a century later, the same aesthetic still guided art.83 The Psalter’s painters would have known at least some parts of the Metamorphoses because it was extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages. (For example, 50 years after the Psalter was painted, Chaucer was indebted to it for Pyramus and Thisbe, whose story features in his Legend of Good Women.84)
For both Ovid, a disinterested commentator, and Suger, an interested patron, ‘the workmanship surpassed the material’ and, since Apollo’s doors were silver and St Denis’ were gold, the workmanship must have been spectacular. Now, silver and gold are easy to define – they are noble metals – but workmanship is more elusive. It could be defined as the artists’ skill at understanding a patron’s wishes and delivering something that satisfied those wishes. If so, then the artist’s workmanship was their ability to convert an idea into an object – their ability to take a disembodied ‘form’ and embody it in some ‘matter’. This relates Ovid and Suger’s judgements to Aristotle’s four causes and ‘the workmanship surpasses the material’ also reflects the relationship of form and matter, since the formal is superior to the material cause.85
Aristotle defined the four causes some 500 years before Christ, and Ovid wrote his description of Apollo’s palace when Christ was still a child. Some in the Middle Ages considered Aristotle and Ovid to be pagans – maybe ‘good’ pagans, but pagans nonetheless. A successful diplomat like Suger would then paraphrase them when extolling the glory of his church only if he felt that their words were fully compatible with the Church’s teachings. Suger went on to give an interpretation that shows exactly how the glittering doors to the Palace of the Sun hold the key to the artists’ use of materials in the Psalter.
Abbot Suger knew how to interpret Ovid’s phrase appropriately, because his poem continued:
Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work
Should brighten the minds, so that they travel, through the true lights,
To the True Light where Christ is the true door …
The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material.86
Elsewhere, Suger described how his dull mind was ‘called away from external cares’ by gazing upon a beautiful, gem-studded, golden cross. He said that it transported him, and he saw himself
dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven.87
Once again, Suger was not alone. For example, in The Soul’s Journey into God, St Bonaventure spoke of starting one’s ascent at the bottom, treating ‘the whole material world as a mirror through which we may pass over to God, the supreme craftsman.’88
So the craftsman reflects God, his or her materials are ‘the slime of the earth’, and the whole material world is ‘a mirror’. Of course, images in mirrors are not entirely ‘true’ since they are only reflections. Similarly, materials are not entirely ‘true’ because the mind has to rise through them to get to the truth. The ‘pure, heavenly’ realm that is closer to the Truth than the material world is a ‘strange region of the universe’, and its strangeness is to be given welcome.
On gazing upon beauty, Suger was transported from the ‘inferior’, material, to the ‘higher’, immaterial region, and the relationship between these two regions was most concisely described in Plato’s allegory of the cave. This describes how our experience of the world can be divided in two. Inside Plato’s cave, matter dominates in a realm of physical sensations and perceptions. Outside the cave, form dominates in a realm of intelligible ideas and conceptions. Everything inside the cave is in a constant state of flux – everything has just become something and, instantly, is about to become something else – subject to the vicissitudes of time. Everything outside the cave is stable and in a state of eternal Being. What goes on inside is a pale reflection or projection of what is outside, just as an ephemeral movie apes more enduring things in the world outside the cinema.89
Suger knew that ‘earth’ was like the inside of Plato’s cave, and he knew that ‘heaven’ was like the outside of Plato’s cave. So he knew that – even if the illusion was convincing – earth offered no lasting realities. He also knew, though, that changes on earth reflected eternal realities in heaven so that there must be ways of escaping the constantly shifting earthly illusion. One extraordinarily powerful way of escaping from ‘the slime of the earth’ was to appreciate beauty and to see all beauties as the kaleidoscopic passing splendours of one eternal truth. Such an appreciation of beauty recognizes that all things in the world are (heavenly) forms embedded in (earthly) matter and that – whether they are the products of Art or Nature – ‘their workmanship surpasses their materials’.
The Psalter’s patron and painters also knew the difference between the inside and outside of Plato’s cave. They were guided by Dominicans who, for about a century, had been enthusiastically integrating the classical and Christian world views. The painters knew that the physical world kept changing – for example, they saw black turn into white and white turn into black. Even if some physical objects seemed to be stable, as artists they knew that they only had to move around for it to offer their eyes a completely different picture. Thus the painters knew that everything about the material realm was limited and changed, either in space or in time.
On the other hand, they knew that the realm of forms was unlimited and fixed, otherwise, everything in the physical world – a combination of form and matter – would be totally incomprehensible. For example, they knew that horses of flesh and blood, or matter, were limited – they could be alive or dead, but not both at the same time – and they also changed, from young to old, for example. Yet the idea, or form, of a horse was unlimited and fixed. So Ovid might have described a horse, over 1,000 years earlier, or Marco Polo could describe one thousands of miles away in China, and the painters would still have known exactly what was being described.
In the Psalter, the painters expressed the difference between the unlimited realm of heavenly forms with their unlimited ideas. Indeed, they expressed the limited realm of earthly matter with their limited ingredients. They purposefully left pigments off their palettes to challenge and stretch themselves, making their task look easy even with one hand tied behind their backs. Their exuberant illuminations, like all good jokes, contain a germ of truth: the imagination may be boundless, but the matter in which it is expressed is earthbound.
The two painters went as far as they could to ‘make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. They did so not to cheat the patron – who was probably ‘in on the joke’ – but in order to dedicate their workmanship to God. As long as the result was beautiful, the more limited their materials, the greater their skill. Dispensing with ultramarine, vermilion and shell gold gave the painters an opportunity to celebrate their skill, in the full knowledge that their skill was a gift given by God – even today, we still call artistic people ‘gifted’.
Theophilus considered that creating a work of art echoed God’s creation of the world, and just as the painters’ skill was evident in their paintings, so God’s work was evident in the natural world. However, as Dante made the great Dominican Thomas Aquinas say:
nature always gives something imperfect,
Working in the same manner as the artist
Who has the skill, and yet his hand shakes.90
The creation reflects the Creator imperfectly, or, in the words of St Paul, ‘through a glass darkly’.91 Nonetheless, even in a dark glass, the glory of God shines through the most modest of creatures.92 The Psalter’s two unknown painters restricted their palette, further ‘darkening the glass’ that reflected their imagination. Furthermore, they did so with supreme confidence, knowing that lovers can see their beloved’s beauty in even the most tarnished of mirrors.
