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Illuminated Bible exhibit celebrates the old in a new way
By Andrew Junker, The Catholic Sun
December 6, 2007
For hundreds of years, reproducing the Scriptures was a labor-intensive task requiring copyists to handwrite every verse. These Bibles often contained beautiful drawings or illuminations of the text and were as much works of art as they were books.
The invention of the printing press put an end to this method and hand-copied Bibles became obsolete.
Until now.
The Phoenix Art Museum will be hosting an exhibition of the Saint John’s Bible, the first handwritten, illuminated Bible of the modern era. The exhibition begins Dec. 11 and runs through March 9.
The Benedictine monks of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota commissioned the Bible as a millennial project that would celebrate their abbey’s 150th anniversary.
“At the time, I thought this would be a very interesting endeavor,” Benedictine Father Eric Hollas said of commissioning the Bible, “but I thought we’d never do it, because it’s the sort of thing that people don’t do today.”
Luckily, the monks found Donald Jackson, a Welsh artist and scribe to the Queen of England, who jumped at the challenge.
Jackson produced the Bible using medieval methods. He and his assistants wrote on vellum, or calfskin, and he mixed all the ink himself. The adhesive he used for the manuscript’s gold leaf comes from a medieval recipe.
“But we wanted to emphasize that the art and illuminations of this Bible should be contemporary,” Fr. Hollas said. “We didn’t want to make an antique and the best Gothic Bibles have already been made. We wanted something that would express 21st century artistic temperament.”
To this end, Jackson incorporated images of the Hubble Space Telescope in some of the illuminations. Across the pages of the Book of Psalms are graphic renditions of sound waves, representing that Jews and Christians alike have sung these sacred poems for centuries.
The monks at St. John’s Abbey also requested that Jackson focus on themes they thought were important to modern Christians.
“Every age has issues that are important to them. If this were the 12th century, kingship might be a big deal to us, so to illustrate that, you’d go to the Book of Kings,” Fr. Hollas explained. “But that was not a theme for us.”
Instead, the illuminations point to themes of hospitality, the link between Judaism and Christianity, women in the Bible and the poor and oppressed.
“Those are themes of our day shown through the artwork,” said Steve Nelson, a trustee of the Phoenix Art Museum and a lay Benedictine oblate. “Even though the work was done with medieval technique, this is a contemporary work of art.”
That combination of modern themes with ancient technique made the Saint John’s Bible attractive to Tom Loughman of the Phoenix Art Museum.
“For us in the West, in a new part of the country, the idea of connecting people today back with a centuries-old tradition is intriguing,” the curator of European art said.
To place the Saint John’s Bible in context, the art museum will include two accompanying exhibits: “The Early History of the Bible” and “Selections from the James Melikian Collection” will feature ancient manuscripts from a variety of locations and cultures.
In the year and a half that Nelson has been promoting the Saint John’s Bible, he’s talked with Jews, Mormons, Muslims and Protestants.
Librarians and calligraphers are interested in the exhibit for its artistic value. A local group of Welsh expatriates is excited because the artist is a countryman of theirs.
But for Fr. Hollas, the Bible in a large way celebrates the Catholic spiritual tradition.
“A lot of people have been deeply touched” by the exhibit, he said. “That’s not what we usually expect when we go to a museum.”
At the same time, Fr. Hollas thought the museum was a good venue to show the beauty of the Scriptures to people who might not belong to a church or attend Mass.
“I think this has the ability to reach out to people in ways that we don’t always appreciate when we don’t use art,” he said. “Art has the ability to cross the gap and project a message that words alone sometimes cannot do.”
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