I found this ancient work today sort of by accident – one of those Wikipedia black holes. Eventually I was reading about Louis IX and his eccentricities, and about the Bible he most likely commissioned, a masterpiece of the 1200s. It’s also called the Maciejowski or Morgan Bible.
One reason I liked it immediately was the vibrant color (extravagant for its time), especially the gold leaf. It’s full of violent Biblical imagery – the medieval equivalent of the Passion of the Christ.
Bibles back then were hand copied and not accessible to most people, who generally couldn’t read anyway. But this also meant that the Bibles that did exist were produced with the utmost care and attention to detail. This one originally had no text – a violent, graphic novel Bible used partly as propaganda for crusaders. The margin text was added later as the book traveled the world.
Interestingly, the incredibly detailed dress and weapons are “modern” in the sense of the reader of the day. It would be like depicting Bible stories using tanks and machine guns – like the 1996 Romeo + Juliet, an old story with modern accoutrements.
More info on this work here.
Since you can’t find this work very easily, I’ve painstakingly put all the high quality images into an archive. It’s over 600MB. This is only for educational purposes.
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