Art Museum Journal

The Christmas Story at Walters Art Museum
By STAN PARCHIN
November 27, 2009

Armenian. Toro Roslin Gospels (detail: MS 539, fol. 208v) (1262). Paint, ink and gold on parchment. Walters Art Museum.

Italian. Cornaro Missal (detail: Nativity) (ca. 1503). Paint, ink and gold on parchment. Private Collection. © Mega-Vision.

 
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland celebrates the yuletide season with the focus exhibition The Christmas Story: Picturing the Birth of Christ in Medieval Manuscripts (December 3, 2009-February 28, 2010).
 
The New Testament's account of Jesus' infancy is remarkably short on specifics. As such, medieval and Renaissance artists became responsible for supplying the story's visual details in the pages of illuminated manuscripts. In the Walters' presentation, the biblical narrative of Jesus' nativity, the angels' announcement of his birth to the shepherds, King Herod of Judea's Massacre of the Innocents in Bethlehem and the Christ Child's narrow escape from the slaughter is recounted through meticulously rendered images from devotional books of hours and missals. The works displayed are drawn almost entirely from the museum's holdings.
 
The Cornaro Missal
Cardinal Patriarch Marco Cornaro (1482-1524) of Renaissance Venice commissioned a missal from an anonymous northern Italian artist. The illustrated volume (ca. 1505) contains all of the prayers and responses recited in the Roman Catholic Mass throughout the liturgical year. During the early 17th Century, the exquisitely illuminated book was set in a Roman binding, its Moroccan leather elaborately tooled in a French fanfare-style design. The missal was acquired by the Austrian branch of the Rothschild family, seized illegally by the Nazis before World War II and later restored to its rightful owners. An unidentified American collector subsequently purchased the manuscript at an auction and lent the religious text to the Walters Art Museum for this exhibition.

 

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