Medieval Scriptorium Exhibition at J. Paul Getty Museum on artmuseumjournal.com

Special Exhibitions

Medieval Scriptorium Exhibition at J. Paul Getty Museum

Fiore Furlan dei Liberi de Premariacco (Italian, ca. 1340/50-before 1450). Aiming Points on the Body (ca. 1410). Tempera colors, gold leaf and ink on parchment, Leaf: 27.9 x 20.6 cm (11 x 8 1/4 in.). J. Paul Getty Museum.

Lieven van Lathem (Flemish, ca. 1430-1493) and Unknown. The Virgin and Child with Angels (ca. 1471). Tempera colors, gold leaf, gold paint, silver paint and ink on parchment. Leaf: 6.3 x 4.6 cm (2 1/2 x 1 13/16 in.).

J. Paul Getty Museum.

By STAN PARCHIN
August 29, 2009

The production of illuminated manuscripts is the subject of The Medieval Scriptorium, a novel exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum from November 24, 2009 to February 14, 2010. Designed for children as well as adults, the presentation of 16 works, drawn entirely from the Getty's collection, describes the artists and scribes responsible for the manufacture of decorated volumes as well as the workshops where they were created.

During the Middle Ages and before the advent of printing, a scriptorium ("place for writing" in Latin) was a place where books were written and illuminated by hand. Many manuscripts related the same stories, hence the need for copyists for both their texts and illustrations. However, there was room for individual artistic expression in the borders of many books' folios (pages). The exhibition considers the development of fanciful margin compositions for illustrative, didactic and decorative reasons.

The western European manuscripts on display are joined by works from other parts of the world to demonstrate how artists from different cultures, separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years, often executed remarkably similar images, partly as a result of books' transportation and exchange over vast distances. On view are Armenian and Ethiopian Gospel books and a Koran.

The Medieval Scriptorium features a number of activities suitable for school-age children. A drawing station, where students can learn how medieval books were copied and illuminated as well as design their own manuscript pages, is centrally located within the exhibition.

Source
De Schryver, Antoine. The Prayer Book of Charles the Bold: A Study of a Flemish Masterpiece from the Burgundian Court. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008.

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