Dear list members,
I just came across this on The Guardian's website (www.guardian.co.uk),
and thought it worthy of being shared. If The Guardian sues me, please
come to my aid!
George
* * * * * * *
Revealed: hidden art behind the gospel truth
Drawings throw new light on a prime sourcebook of English Christianity
- and the Venerable Bede's role in it
John Ezard
Tuesday May 30, 2000
Sixty previously undetected drawings have been discovered in the
Lindisfarne Gospels - nearly 1,300 years after the illuminated Latin
manuscript was created as one of the world's greatest artistic treasures.
The discovery, made by a senior British Library scholar using a high-
magnification binocular microscope, was said yesterday to show that
the volume marked the birth of the first distinctively and proudly
"English" culture.
Another key finding of the research is that the dating of the gospels -
one of the prime sourcebooks of English Christianity - should be moved
forward from the long-accepted AD698 to about AD720.
This means that the Venerable Bede, author of the first English history
book, is now thought likely to have also been involved in producing the
masterpiece.
The drawings have been identified by Michelle Brown, curator of
illuminated manuscripts at the British Library. She disclosed this at
the weekend in a 23-page lecture, with 130 footnotes, to an astonished
audience of scholars in Bede's seventh century church at Jarrow, close
to the site of the original Lindisfarne monastery on Holy Island,
Northumberland.
Last night she said, "The audience all leapt up in their seats. It was
the most incredible feeling".
Study of the drawings, discovered on the back of calf hide parchment,
established them as by far the earliest known use of a metal-point pen,
a forerunner of the pencil. No other metal-point drawings are known to
have existed before 1100.
In many of the drawings, the artist also used paint that washed through
to the front of the parchment. This can still be faintly seen. But the
metal-point outlines are invisible to the naked eye.
Some traces of drawings were noted when the Lindisfarne Gospels were
last closely examined at the British Museum in the 1950s. Ms Brown
said they were not found then, partly because microscope technology
was less advanced.
"I went looking for them. It was a bit like looking at an archaeological
site."
She used steeply angled light. "Lo and behold, the drawings were there
- like the plough marks you get in a field."
Invasions
What she had discovered was a series of practice sketches on every page
of the manuscript. They were the doodle-pads used by a monk working in an
era of recurrent invasions, when monasteries in remote, rocky places such
as Lindisfarne were refuges of learning and art.
The artist is believed to be Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne from 698 to
721. A note inserted in the manuscript two centuries later said he
"originally wrote this book in honour of God and St Cuthbert and the
whole company of saints whose relics are on the island".
He practised script letters, visible under the microscope as ridges and
furrows in parchment. He also tried out preliminary versions of flowers,
birds and other images. He did this preparatory work on the backs of
parchments because calf hide was too expensive to be used as sketchpaper.
The significance of the styles in which he drew will be the topic of
scholarly analysis and theory for decades.
Ms Brown said these indicated that he was "consciously creating a new
English culture". The sketches proved that he had begun by planning to
write the gospels in a traditional Roman half-uncial script familiar
from the culture of Lindisfarne's more civilised mother churches in
Rome and the Mediterranean. But in his finished manuscript, he changed
tack radically. He fused this style with Anglo-Saxon runic letters,
some of them only seen before on pagan inscriptions.
"He was grafting these on to Mediterranean script," Ms Brown said.
"He was having to make up his font as he went along. It was a conscious
decision. It was the first time runic figures had been used in a book."
Images of flowers and ducks' heads in the sketches and manuscript
showed Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences. For the nobles, visiting
clerics, pilgrims and foreign dignitaries who first saw the gospels,
these would have been clear messages.
They proclaimed to Rome that the young English church was "no provincial
outpost but vibrant and integrated", she said in the lecture. "A prime
motivation was to define what it meant to be Northumbrian, to be English
and to be a part of the wider Christian church. The style of lettering
was important. It needed to ring bells in the audience's mind of both
'Englishness' and 'Romanness'."
Yesterday she added: "It was to show that Anglo-Saxons were up to the
minute. It was the way you got a newly Christianised people to pull
together."
Her argument for redating the manuscript is based on evidence about its
style and technical production. Bede, a monk at Jarrow 40 miles from
Lindisfarne, which had close links with it, was 47 years old in 720. His
Ecclesiastical History of the English People was finished in 732.
"I think Bede would have been consulted about the thinking behind the
production of the gospels," Ms Brown said. "One of the figures in the
volume's painting of St Matthew relates to a theological issue he raised."
* * * * * * *
The British Library has a page dedicated to this codex:
http://www.bl.uk/diglib/treasures/lindisfarne.html
Best wishes,
George
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