Herbert L. Kessler

On the State of Medieval Art History

Ever since Renaissance humanists conceived the Middle Ages as a foil for their own accomplishments, “medieval art” has been understood not so much as a result of co-herent artistic developments as the product of external his-torical processes. To be sure, scholars have discerned short chains of linked morphological transformations, usually in connection with efforts to reinstate classical conventions. But they have been unable to chart the kind of logical succession of artistic responses that give apparent consis-tency to ancient Greek sculpture or Renaissance painting - that is, a consistency largely independent of extra-ar-tistic events.

The Cotton Genesis : British Library, Codex Cotton Otho B VI

The Description for this book, The Cotton Genesis: The Illustrations in the Manuscripts of the Septuagint, Volume I. British Library, Codex Cotton Otho B. VI. (PMAA-45), will be forthcoming.

Hic Homo Formatur: The Genesis Frontispieces of the Carolingian Bibles

Manuscripts of the complete Bible illuminated with a unified and comprehensive set of illustrations are unknown before the ninth century. Only single books and small compendia such as the Pentateuch and Gospels, illustrated with pictures interspersed within the columns of text, gathered together at the tops or bottoms of text pages, or, occasionally, arranged on separate folios, survive from the Early Christian period; and surely no full Bible ever was illustrated with the density typical of these early volumes.1 To provide the complete biblical text with a consistent set of illustrations, artists eventually developed a system of full-page miniatures placed within or at the front of the various books, thereby establishing a clear over-all structure while severely reducing the total number of pictures. In constructing these miniatures, illuminators did not reject the earlier tradition – quite the contrary. As Kohler has argued for the Bibles from Tours,2 as Gaehde has shown for the San Paolo Bible,3 and as...