Dan Harlow

For those of you who live in and around London (or have the means to fly there for the weekend), there is an exhibition of early religious texts being presented at the British Library beginning April 27th, 2007.

The British Library has an unsurpassed collection of sacred texts across all faiths. They range from some of the best-known and most beautiful handwritten copies (manuscripts) of the scriptures of various religions to a very extensive collection of printed editions, both early and modern.

Sacred, which runs from 27 April to 23 September 2007 in our London galleries, is the first in a series of major exhibitions celebrating the diversity of religious traditions within Britain today.

The most striking aspect of these texts is the meticulous artwork contained within. One can easily imagine a lonely monk huddled in a drafty monastery sometime in the 15th century creating each masterpiece by hand and candlelight. It really is quite remarkable how religion has inspired some of the worlds most beautiful and influential artwork. The absolute love of faith these artists had shows in even the smallest of details.

This detail (left) is from the Suffrages of the Saints by Birago and it illustrates St. Anthony’s temptations by demons. St. Anthony lead a life of poverty and self denial and his temptations were a popular subject for many artists including Mantegna and Schongauer. The restoration work done on this and other texts makes the image seem as if it had been created just yesterday using modern inks and techniques when in fact this particular work, the Sforza Hours, was created in the early 16th century. The book itself (which is only 13cm by 10cm in size) is a book of prayers designed for a private person to know when to pray during the eight allotted times a day for prayer as outlined by the church.

Truly, works such as these represent the very best religion has to offer but recently discovered texts reveal an interesting fact as to how some of these books were actually made.

It seems that many early Christian prayer books were actually created on top of earlier writings which researchers have discovered contained the copied down the works of Aristotle, Archimedes and Hyperide. Since parchment was very valuable, older and outdated works were erased by a process known as palimpsesting which is a fancy way to say the later artists used orange juice as a solvent to wash away the old ink so that they wouldn’t have to buy new, expensive parchment.

For hundreds of years, medieval Christians were praying from books that also contained the great, early scientific discoveries of the ancient Greeks. While the church was busy trying to control science, right under their noses and in the hands of the average (though wealthy enough to afford a nice book) citizen were the very ideas which would later lead to the Enlightenment and the Reformation of Martin Luther.

From National Geographic:

Since 2002 scientists have been using a technique known as multispectral imaging to take digital photographs of the book’s pages at different wavelengths.

The images enable the researchers to pull hidden words out from behind the religious writings.

EDIT : The British Library web site has an article up detailing the many blogs (including this one) that have written about this exhibit. Thank you for the link.

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