Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself from the marble cornice and flapped in a leisurely way across to the gallery where once Byzantine empresses worshipped, encased in pearls and purple. Instinctively, one of the tweeds lifted his umbrella to his right shoulder and sighted along its shaft. He nearly dropped it in surprise: “Good God,” he said, “bloody thing’s out of shot.” After that, the party had a healthier respect for the grandeur of this great fane.
Other museum-goers are moved by a hunger for information rather than an atavistic instinct for field sports. See how some people spend substantially more time reading the didactic label on the wall than they do confronting the complexity of the work it interprets. Such folk should find joy if they go to see the St. John’s Bible, numerous sheets of which are on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (until July 3), together with plenty of explanatory props: quill pens, penknives, even photographs of the sheep-surrounded scriptorium in Wales where the scribes commissioned by St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, penned this, the first handwritten Bible in half a millennium.
For at this exhibition, the urge to read rather than to look leads the eye not to the (excellent) supporting information but to the texts of the Bible pages themselves, written in real time to be read in real time. The pleasure of contemplating these great creamy white sheets (about two feet high and two and a half feet wide when spread out) is like the pleasure of watching an artist sketching in the open air; you are drawn to take part in his art, though in this case you fall into the rhythm of his work not by actually seeing him marking the regular black text with his goose quill, but by following with the eye the dance of the text across the page. Such watching induces a passion of patience.
Of course, too, there is looking in addition to reading, for it is the illuminations that catch the eye. They light up the text with multiple colors and associations. Alongside the Parable of the Sower is a figure who might have walked straight out of a Byzantine Gospel-book with his round halo and imperial purple tunic, except that this nether man is clad in something that looks mighty like the blue jeans of a Stearns County bachelor farmer. The butterflies are delightful (as butterflies always are), and gold leaf makes Christ at the Transfiguration appear to be entirely made of light.
But for all their glory, it is to the text that the pictures bring you back. One visitor was overheard to say she had found the exhibition so interesting that when she got home she was going to find a Bible and read it. If the manuscript has this effect on many people, the monks of St. John’s will surely feel they were right to commission it.
Scripture, said Gregory the Great, is a stream where lambs may wade and elephants may swim. A friend was telling me the other day about the meetings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars whose assumptions I do not entirely share (why assume that miracles do not happen?), but who had the admirable aim of analyzing the Gospels to work out what Jesus actually said and did. They also had the good sense to set up their headquarters in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, so that after a hard day’s analyzing they could visit the venerable vineyard of Gundlach-Bundschau, in existence since 1857 (though it grew pears during Prohibition).
You can enjoy a vicarious visit by drinking their Bearitage, Lot no. 11, a red wine available locally for about $12. They call this “California claret,” because like the great reds of Bordeaux it is a blend of several grapes. The analytical palate will detect the round sweetness of Zinfandel, the blandness of Merlot, the long slow tannins of Cabernet Sauvignon (which will give this wine the capacity to keep, though it is also nice now). Analysis is enlightening but not necessary. This wine is more than the sum of its parts; with a steak it told a coherent and convincing story, one which I think would please anyone who has red wine running in his veins.
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