Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Miniature Of The Ascention

"Plate 21 (which ought to have been inserted in succession to plate 7) reproduces a miniature from a Breviary written about 1150-60 for Isengrim, Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Ottenbeuern in Suabia. The miniature reproduced is a picture of the Ascension, and shows the Savior standing in an almond-shaped frame, supported and borne aloft by four angels. The Virgin and the Apostles are looking upwards from below, and the picture is enclosed within a square blue border, this being-lighted by ornamental fretwork in white. The faces are generally well drawn, and the rapt attention in the eyes of the uplookers is very skilfully depicted. The colors used are blue, green, yellow, red, chestnut, and white. The whole effect is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon work, and one might easily, at first sight, mistake it for a picture out of an English book of the tenth century. A somewhat similar design of the same subject is found in King Athelstan's Psalter an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the late ninth century, now in the British Museum; but the Suabian illustration is decidedly inferior in taste and delicacy of treatment. It shows, however, such a kinship that we are inclined to believe in a nearer connection between German and English art than between German and French Carolingian."

Plates from O. V. Palaeography: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
 

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