Getty Museum

Antiphonal

Date

about 1260–1270

Medium

Tempera colors, gold leaf, silver, and ink

Culture

Franco-Flemish

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

This manuscript was once part of a larger, or perhaps even multi-volume, choir book. Known as antiphonals, these manuscripts were produced for choirs in Christian churches and included the sung portions of the Divine Office, the prayer service for each day of the Catholic calendar. This manuscript is significant for the extent and nature of its illustration, including at least twelve initials that begin the feasts of saints with illuminations that depict scenes from their lives. Such a large narrative program was uncommon in thirteenth-century choir books. This antiphonal was created for an abbey of Cistercian monks or nuns in the Franco-Flemish region (perhaps the Abbey of Cambron in present-day Belgium). At the very end of the eleventh century a group of monks from the Benedictine Order founded their own community in Cîteaux in eastern France, with an aim to return to the monastic ideals of austerity espoused by St. Benedict in the sixth century CE. These monks came to be known as the Cistercians, donning white robes to distinguish themselves from their Benedictine counterparts, who dressed in black. Although the monks were known for their austerity, manuscripts like this one show how they still valued beautifully decorated manuscripts. Nineteen leaves and four illuminated cuttings, all from the same manuscript, were in the original Ludwig collection, but after the Getty attained eighty-three text leaves from the same antiphonal in 1992, conservators were able to bind the eighty-three leaves with the nineteen leaves in an approximation of the antiphonal’s original format. The four cuttings could not be reintegrated into the remade manuscript but are still within the [collection][1]. [1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/105SWB

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