The bibliophile enters the library abstractedly, there to muse upon volumes true and tried; and through the ages his reverent, disinterested spirit has builded better than it knew. Indeed, it alone tided books across the Dark Ages; for even when they could not read, some there were who had wit enough to appreciate letters in the abstract. Contrast their attitude with that of the executive Caliph Omar, who burned a great library at Alexandria in 635, declaring that if the books were orthodox (Mohammedan orthodoxy, of course) they were unnecessary; if heterodox, pernicious. That is what it means to have mere practical people around among books.
I can conceive of no human relic more touching than a Bible copied with conscientious care during this unsympathetic era. Hence the Book of Kells,[5] which is destitute of one touch of the native artist, however immature, is often spoken of as the most beautiful book in the world. It is supposed to have been executed about the eighth century, since its illuminators had advanced from the mere red capitals adorned with twisted dragons to pictures relating to the text. The symbols of the apostles, especially the bird-like lion of Saint Mark, appear repeatedly on the margins; also, there is a representation of Saint Matthew with hands growing from his shoulders, holding up to the world two copies of “The Book.” Among its illustrations are the Arrest of Jesus, the Agony of the Garden, and, most interesting of all, four angels and a Virgin and Child appear on the old pages, for, crude as these figures are, they may be reckoned among the direct ancestors of those beautiful Holy Families born on Italian and Flemish canvases eight or nine hundred years later, whose sweet faces still sway the world.
A Tribute to the Scribes of the Dark Ages,
from One of Their Intellectual Descendants,
a Painter of the Moyen Age
Christian art began as illustration on the pages of holy books, and as illustration it expanded onto wood and canvas, bronze and marble. The peculiar grace of pictorial art crept into it incidentally, by accident of genius. That famous Giotto of the Louvre showing “Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata” is simply a direct explanation of the subject, far more beautiful in idea than in execution. There are the figures of Jesus and of Saint Francis; Christ is flying toward “the most Christ-like of men,” and gilt lines from every wound in our Savior piercing Saint Francis in the same parts of the body bind that sympathetic saint to his Redeemer, while unknown to the holy brother a halo appears back of his head.
This idea of illustration made beautiful that it might be worthy of the subject which it treated, that arose in the old scriptoriums, reached its perfection on [Ghiberti’s doors to the Baptistry] at Florence. Michael Angelo called them the Gates of Paradise. Illuminated books of a later date display equally noble, artistic connections. I have seen little Madonnas in Books of Hours in the British Museum that seem like imperfect copies of Raphael, whereas they precede him by nearly a century.
Mediæval story is full of the visits of angels to despairing illuminators and scribes who found themselves unable to execute books worthy in their material beauty to convey the word of God. Our Lady herself sometimes came down to console them. Did forecasts of the beautiful pictures yet to come sometimes appear to the humble dreamers of the cloister as they worked away on the margins of holy books? Not literally, of course, for taste was too crude to conceive of a developed art. But may not some old artist have conceived in his cell of a pictured Madonna, so beautiful that pilgrims came from afar to do her honor, so sweet that she could uplift them from sin? And perhaps the soul of that humble old scribe finds its paradise in the better part of some inscrutable genius whose Madonnas perpetually uplift the world, for the soul of a saint is active forever.
