Getty Museum

Decorated Text Page

Date

first quarter of 11th century

Medium

Tempera colors, gold, silver, and ink

Culture

Ottonian

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

In the sacramentary's beautiful script, the artist celebrated the primacy of the written words of Scripture, or the Lord's Word, through the precious materials of gold and silver with which he wrote. Here a simple frame with gold border encloses a portion of the text of the Preface of the Mass without any figurative or decorative elements. The gold display script is modeled on the grandest scripts used in antiquity. The frame around the text and use of a display script for the first three pages-the rest of the text is written in a more common script-calls attention to the scribe's craft of forming beautiful letters and laying them out on the page in a pleasing and legible manner. This page complements folio 1v, which it faces across the open book.

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