Curtain of the Tabernacle

This book is a commentary on the Bible, with illustrations of objects that are commissions by God. He’s like the original patron of the arts, he’s giving a set of instructions and this is an effort by a medieval artist to try to visualize that object that’s being described. It is a textbook, written by a professor. We think of medieval art as revving up your spiritual sense. The Middle Ages really was the place where universities were invented. These pages are a testimony to that kind of geeky side of the Middle Ages. It’s as much about the power of images as anything I know. I love it because it is exquisitely tactile. These are actually leaves that have been removed from their original binding. My favorite is the Curtains of the Tabernacle. To me it looks like a circus tent, these nice stripes of blues and reds and yellows. And it’s a very particular set of instructions given by God about colors, about fabrics, about where you have to put the loops and how they’re going to get sewn together, which when you read it, don’t really make sense to us. It’s almost like conceptual art; that cool abstraction, that minimalist sensibility. But these knock-you-out bits of color, with these very select moments of gold that shimmer, I think makes it a very sensuous set of pages. I’m never able to forget that it’s a handmade thing. It’s really the book as a work of art, and the book in all its glory. And in that way it really beats any modern day textbook, because it’s so closely connected 42 00:02:13,433 --> 00:00:09,000 with an artist of, oh, six hundred years ago.