Sunday, June 20, 2010

Diet of Worms

Did you know that Job was afflicted by worms? See and believe! (Or read about it in the "Testament of Job" and Septuagint.) Even more impressive in full color, with gilt backgrounds! (But the page below, from the end of Revelations, is the only one of which I have a color picture.)
But don't suppose you can understand any of these images on its own. In a "Bible Moralisée" like this, each Old Testament scene is paired with a New Testament scene which it prefigures. (Just don't ask me which scene goes with which, though I'd sorely like to know - if you can figure it out, I'd be happy to learn!) This is from a version dating perhaps to the early 1220s, and resides in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. Sometimes "Bible Moralisée" pairings are horizontal, but usually, as here, they are vertical. From the same page:









Vienna 1179, folio 147r and 246r (color), in John Lowden, The Making of the “Bibles Moralisées” (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), vol. 1.