22 May 2012

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

ARCHITECTURE AND ART IN NAVARRA AT THE TIME OF NAVAS DE TOLOSA

The King Sancho the Strong's bible of 1197

Ms Soledad de Silva y Verástegui.
University of the Basque Country

We dedicate this lecture to the interesting copy of the Bible which was commissioned by King Sancho el Fuerte of Navarre to Fernando Pérez de Funes and which he completed in 1197, for the use of the monarch. The manuscript is currently in the Library Services Municipal de Amiens (ms.108). Although L. Delisle drew attention to it at the end of the 19th century, and R. Fawtier mentioned it in 1923, the first existing monograph on it is due to F. Bucher in 1970, where he relates it to a second copy, a copy of it, made around 1200, today in the Library Services University of Augsburg (Cod.I.2.4º15) and a new copy made in Paris ca.1300, currently in the New York Public Library (Spencer collection, ms.22). Since then the manuscript has hardly been mentioned except in programs of study on certain medieval iconographic themes (J.Yarza,1974;L.Ross,1994;J.Baschet,2000) of which the Bible provides very interesting examples. The recent facsimile edition of the Bible preserved in Augsburg published in 2006, has led to a volume of programs of study to position by various specialists (G.Hägele, L.Kart. I. Schäfer and G.Bartz) but focusing especially on this copy, which has motivated us to dedicate this study to the King's Bible of 1197 which is the original manuscript.

After the state of the question we deal with its typology, -one of the oldest picture Bibles- in the Peninsula and we relate it to similar copies that also began to spread in France and England around 1200. The importance that this new fact has in the history of the illustrated book in the Age is valued average .Within the aesthetic currents of this period its linear and drawing style is characterised by enormously simple compositions, with a clear tendency to convert the narrative into symbolic, breaking with the realistic representation.

Of great interest is its iconographic programme, which includes, in addition to the themes of the Old and New Testament, a numerous compilation of Lives of Saints, unprecedented in Hispanic miniatures until then, and very exceptional for its extension in the European panorama. The programme concludes with a short apocalyptic cycle. Some of the most important images from each of these four iconographic sections are analysed. For the A.T. and N.T. themes, the biblical illustrative tradition of the Peninsula from the 10th to the 13th century is taken into account, although the Bible of the Navarrese sovereign provides us with unique images that can be explained by very varied influences from the Jewish, Eastern and Byzantine worlds. Others, on the other hand, refer to European models that reached the royal scriptorium. The Lives of the Saints have some important Hispanic miniated precedents, although most of the representations have their parallels in European miniatures. The image of the Final Parousia or Second Coming of the Son of Man is highly original and can be explained mainly by the influence of theological texts of the period.
 

King Sancho the Strong's Bible. 1197
Nativity of the Virgin
Cliché CNRS-IRHT/Bibliothèques d'Amiens Métropole,MS.108 C, fol.166v