9/11/2023 0 Comments Illuminated manuscript middle ages![]() They embody timeless themes of cross-cultural adaptation, inspiration, emulation, and even misrepresentation. My friend and former colleague Jennifer Li and I taught a four-part course at the Getty called East/West Connections that considered the relationships among artistic traditions, such as silks from the Islamic world and Italian medieval and Renaissance painting, Chinese porcelain and French and Dutch Baroque decorative arts, Japanese woodblock prints and Impressionism, and the controversial topic of Orientalism across periods and movements.Īmong all these objects, it is the medieval paintings found in manuscripts that offer the earliest glimpses into a global past. In conceiving Traversing the Globe, I drew upon two previous team-teaching experiences. Teaching with the permanent collection has since afforded me many pathways for (re)considering the global narratives possible in a museum setting. Row 2: Roger Fenton (92.XM.53) George Trubert (Ms. Global inspiration from the Getty permanent collection. This multi-sensorial component will also live online forever through the Getty Iris series Medieval Manuscripts Alive. ![]() Thanks to a group of specialists and to our digital media departments, visitors to the exhibition will be able to hear a selection of readings in historic languages from a range of manuscripts. ![]() This combination of auditory and visual engagement with art was central to us in planning the exhibition. This experience was deeply moving not only for the family, but for me as well. The patriarch was in tears, and he exclaimed that it was wondrous to see an object embodying his cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage in a museum. After introducing a small group of visitors to a recently acquired page from an Ethiopian Gospel Book (shown above), I heard a family reading aloud what I later learned were the words penned on the parchment in Ge’ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Church. My initial spark for thinking in global terms about the Getty Museum’s collection-which is largely comprised of art from western Europe and the United States-was an interaction I had as an educator here almost a decade ago. Saint John (detail), Ethiopian, late 14th-early 15th century, leaf from a Gospel Book (text in Ge’ez). Rare, highly prized manuscripts and painted books produced on animal-skin parchment, paper, and palm leaf paper in Traversing the Globe allow us to glimpse, admire, and study a bygone world, its peoples, and its belief systems. The peoples of Europe, Africa, and Asia, in particular, were far more connected-through trade, travel, and religious and political engagements-than we might realize today. The exhibition Traversing the Globe through Illuminated Manuscripts (January 26-June 26, 2016) explores cultural and religious exchanges, moments of encounter and exploration, and material pursuits of the premodern world as seen on the pages of books produced around the globe.įrom solitary monastic sites in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal to royal mining communities in the Southern Andes Mountains, from courtly centers in northern Europe to the scriptoria of Ethiopia, the exhibition reveals images of and ideas about the world from the 9th to the early 17th century. The manuscripts galleries at the Getty invite you to embark on a journey around the world through the art of the book. The most valuable copies were taken to the imperial Library in Vienna, while the incunabula from the Styrian monasteries were handed over to the Graz Lyceum, and are now part of the University Library in Graz’s collection.Map highlighting major centers of book use and production presented in the exhibition Traversing the Globe through Illuminated Manuscripts. The National and University Library’s predecessor, the Lyceum Library only acquired a smaller part of incunabula from the disbanded monasteries of the Carniola Duchy. The National and University Library keeps 497 copies of incunabula, which is only a small fraction of the 15th century prints which were once kept by different religious and secular institutions in the present day Slovenian territory. The invention of printing had an extraordinary impact on science, literature, culture and economy. It is estimated, that over 40.000 different editions in approximately 4.500.000 copies of these earliest typographical monuments have been preserved. It stands for the earliest prints, made from the beginning of printing in the 1450s until the end of the year 1500. The word “incunabulum” comes from the Latin expression for “cradle”.
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