Last Sunday I saw an exhibit of pages from the hand-written, hand-illuminated Saint John’s Bible at the New Mexico History Museum here in Santa Fe. It’s a glorious exhibit, and it’s been traveling around the US, so if you have a chance to see it I highly recommend it. The website for the bible has information on how it was conceived and made, and in this section you can see many more pages than you can at the exhibitions.
I went on a docent tour of the exhibit, and I’m going to go back again to take more time to see the pages. There were three things I found most interesting:
In a sort of reversal of technology, the main calligrapher first developed a computer font of the scripts that would be used for the text. He then used it to layout the pages, size the text and define line breaks. The scribes worked from these layouts when doing the handwork.
The illuminations are very contemporary, both in feel and subject matter. The Old Testament is full of fire and brimstone, and there are references to the holocaust and other genocides of the 20th century. As the website explains “Throughout The Saint John’s Bible you’ll see the signs of our times. Strands of DNA are woven into the illumination of the ‘Genealogy of Christ.’ The Twin Towers in New York appear in the illumination of Luke’s parables. Satellite photos of the Ganges River Delta and photos from the Hubble telescope were used to depict Creation. In Acts, ‘To the Ends of the Earth’ includes the first vision of earth as seen from space.”
And lastly, how did they deal with mistakes? Since the pages are parchment, wrong letters can be removed with a scalpel. A missing line means the page needs to be rewritten, but sometimes that’s not feasible. So the calligrapher uses a “signe-de-renvoi” or a “sign of return”. It’s a graphic symbol marking the place where a correction or insertion is made, and pointing, as well, to the missing text. For the Saint John’s Bible, they use a bird, whose beak points to the error (apparently they also used 2 other animals, but I couldn’t find any examples). Below is a page with such a signe-de-renvoi in the left column.
