The Illustrated Giant Bible of Perugia (Biblioteca Augusta, Ms. L. 59). A Manuscript and Its Creators in Eleventh-Century Central Italy (original) (raw)

PLEASE NOTE: I have begun to upload the text and appendices of my dissertation in segments. As of today (5 November 2011), Chapters 1-3 are posted, incuding some of the appendices. Other sections will be added soon, as I work out the formatting problems for on-line posting. Please note that the dissertation was copyrighted in 2004 with University Microfilms International now UMI/Proquest, through whom a complete edition (print and digital), with photographs and full appendices, will be made available early in 2012. Praised by Edward Garrison as “the most impressive, the most monumental illustrations of all the Italian twelfth century now known,” the miniatures of the Giant Bible of Perugia’s Biblioteca Comunale Augusta (Ms. L. 59) and the codex that contains them have always defied compelling classification. Although generally considered a twelfth-century Roman work, the manuscript varies from the norms of the Umbro-Roman Giant Bible ‘edition’ in the lavishness of its initials, in the monumental style of its miniatures, and in its episodic illustrations of the Six Days of Creation, a narrative otherwise unattested in central Italian art before the late twelfth century. This comparative codicological study of the manuscript in its principal aspects—textual, palaeographic, structural, and pictorial—results in a model of its origins significantly different from previous hypotheses based on pictorial considerations alone. Attributed to scribes and painters at work in northern Umbria or southeastern Tuscany in the years between circa 1060 and 1080, the Latin Old Testament of the Biblioteca Augusta seems to have been made for donation, probably to the Cathedral of Perugia, under the sponsorship of a married couple who commemorated their union through the unusual iconography of its miniatures. Its closest textual-paleographic kin within the larger family of the Italian Giant Bibles turn out, in some cases, to be codices formerly assigned to entirely different regions. Most notable are the magnificently illustrated Edili Bible (Florence, Bibl Medicea Laurenziana, Edili 125-126), the first volume of the First Casanatense Bible (Rome, Bibl. Casanatense, Ms. 720), and the little-known Giant Bible of the Abbey of S. Pietro in Perugia (Archivio Storico di S. Pietro, Cod. I). The differing decorations of these Bibles, combined with their intimately related texts and, in the first two cases, similar or identical scribal hands, urge a rethinking of the style-based methods normally used to date and localize Italian Giant Bibles. They also suggest a complex division of labor, a surprisingly early chronology, and a possible association of some early Italian Giant Bible production with southern Tuscan centers, including S. Salvatore of Monte Amiata.