Getty Museum

Two miniatures from a Book of Old Testament Prophets

Date

about 1300

Medium

Tempera colors and gold

Culture

Italian

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

These two miniatures, made in Sicily around the year 1300, once belonged to the same manuscript. They show rarely-depicted episodes from the biblical books of Isaiah and Zechariah. Their elongated figures, fluid and brightly highlighted drapery, and delicate use of color are characteristic of art made in the later years of the Byzantine Empire, which was the eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), that existed from 330-1453 CE. There was a community of Greek artists on Sicily in the early fourteenth century, who painted in a style reminiscent of Byzantine art, and one of them may have made these miniatures. However, while Byzantine texts are largely in Greek, these cuttings probably do not come from a Greek book. At the top of one of the miniatures, we can still see the tail of a sort of scribal flourish common only in books written in Latin, the language used in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Therefore, the pictures probably illustrated a Latin manuscript, perhaps one containing the biblical books of the prophets, painted in a Byzantinizing style. Scholars have also proposed that they may have come from a large Latin bible, a world history, or even from a medical manuscript.

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