Your face doesn't fit ... who would expect to find a mischievious caricature on a revered scripture like the Bangor Pontifical? Photograph: Tom Service
As usual click on the picture for the larger view.
From the Guardian:
It looks like something Jake and Dinos Chapman might do if they turned their hand to the creative defacement of illuminated manuscripts: the Viz-style gargoyle just to the left of the plainchant notation on page 77 of the nearly 700-year-old Bangor Pontifical, one of the treasures of the Welsh medieval world.
....
And yet in the middle of this beautiful Latin hand – the meticulous gold-leaf decorations and square noteheads of the neumes looking as vivid as they must have done in the early 14th century, and every vellum surface of the book seeming to speak across the centuries – there's a cartoonish scribble of what looks like an unshaven 21st-century bloke with curly hair, a big nose, bejewelled beard, flat cap and shades. Except that it's not. According to Sally Harper, leader of the Bangor Pontifical Project...this is an original piece of medieval satire the scurrilous scribe included beside the chant, which would have been sung to consecrate a church bell.
What a delight to find such a clever, though mischievous, cartoon in the process of doing serious research.
Thanks to Cathy for the link.
UPDATE: From Lapin in the comments:
You've jogged me into photographing a couple of items that I own and uploading them to my Facebook page. Click on the left-hand image to see the full thing. There's a fun red dragon lurking up at the top of the page.
I clicked and copied, and here is!
There is a lot of whimsey in medieval manuscripts.
ReplyDeletePaul, I did not know. I suppose writing the manuscripts became tedious at times, and the scribes needed a bit of comic relief. I love the cartoon. A self-portrait, perhaps?
ReplyDeleteAs Paul says, these are common in medieval mss, particularly those of the 14th & 15th centuries. You've jogged me into photographing a couple of items that I own and uploading them to my Facebook page. Click on the left-hand image to see the full thing. There's a fun red dragon lurking up at the top of the page.
ReplyDeletePerhaps someone had issues with Brother Superior that day. Maybe the anonymous scribe forced to make yet another Pontifical in the scriptorium decided to get in a little revenge for the ages.
ReplyDeleteThen again, even 14th century monks in a scriptorium got bored sometimes with the tedious labor.
ReplyDeleteMake that, especially monks in a scriptorium got bored, and probably frequently, with the tedious labor.
One that I saw long ago, was whimsy for a practical purpose: the scribe had, apparently, left out a word. The missing word was rather haphazardly scribed in the margin, and the illuminator drew two monks, one travelling up a long ladder in the margin, pulling the word behind, and the other pointing to the place the word should've gone!
ReplyDeleteThat's nice, Mark.
ReplyDeleteMark, that's great fun :-)
ReplyDeleteI love the wee dragon.
Maybe the monk was bored, but maybe he was just rather talented at drawing, as you might expect with those who did this sort of work, and took to doodling freely in a quiet moment, thinking no one would ever notice.