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!
