Is the Bible a metapicture? After studying religious texts during our unit on illuminated manuscripts, I began to question the importance of the Written. The manuscripts we’ve studied and The Book of Kells demonstrate a great reverence for the written, the pictoral, the literary sign; these entities garner more respect in ancient times than I think we attribute to them today. When we consider early Western images, they seem nearly inseparable from the divine. In the case of illuminated manuscripts, I think these religious texts remain sacred because they seem to tangibly demonstrate the power of God and man’s function within God’s plan.
If we believe the Bible and scriptures, humans are God’s greatest work of art. God is the ultimate artist/writer, and supposedly created humans to carry out his teachings and plan. The creation of a book is a similar endeavour, but on a human scale. Humans create the intricate pictures found in sacred manuscripts express the ‘message’ of the passages they accompany, lending support to the words of God in a parallel process of creation. The miniatures adorn pages that narrate the very origin of (holy) design, of intentional artistic rendering, the creative endeavours of the grand immortal artist.
The human, the being most similar to God, aspires to imitate its creator. Following this logic, we (humans) are art (the creation of God), that creates art (illuminated books), that creates the creator (the sacred books/miniatures disperse and make real the presence of God for the laymen), who creates art (back to the creation of man). The illuminated manuscripts, then, are entities that call into question and express the very nature of humankind: are we, in fact, self-referential images of God?
Was the popularity of illuminated manuscripts due to their self-referential properties? Probably not, but it’s something to think about.
Hope these random philosophical musings make sense in some way to other people!
