Perched on both knees and her right elbow, the woman rests amidst thick fronds of fruiting foliage that relate closely to the forms of her body (Fig. 16). A first frond begins in front of her elbow, grows upwards and inwards towards her arm, bends back along with the angle of her hand, arcs around her face, and then bursts open into leaves and fruits just above her head. A second stem arcs upward behind her upper body before likewise bursting into bloom just above her outstretched left arm. A third twists its way upward in front of her lower torso: unlike the others, this frond expands outward into leaves and fruits that grow along its whole curving length. Two large leaves topped with seeded fruits extend onto the woman's abdomen and intersect there with its defining lines. Two others curl backward in space around her buttocks and thighs, even as this part of her body twists sharply downwards towards the ground. A fourth frond enters the sculpture from beyond a break in its block and is bent into a horizontal direction by a disembodied clawed hand; this bend in the frond echoes that in the woman's knees below. By bending the frond, furthermore, the clawed hand directs one of its fruits directly into the woman's outstretched hand, an intersection that is emphasized as the third frond passes behind her wrist. Following the line of her left arm forward connects the rounded form of the fruit in her hand to the similarly rounded forms of her breasts, suggesting that they likewise be seen as the fruits of the second frond, as it passes behind her body in line with them. Finally, the curves of the first frond, along with the gesture of the woman's bent right arm, call attention to her remarkably detailed and expressive face, which turns away from her extended arm and body (Fig. 17). She has a small, tight mouth, a damaged nose, and huge eyes. Her eyes are deep set with heavy eyelids, bulging eyeballs, deeply drilled pupils, and sharp lower ridges. A faint mark appears in the inner corner of her left eye and suggests the possibility of a tear forming there.

The meanings of even seemingly conventional medieval figurations are articulated by graphic elements that engage the basic principles revealed by the diverse essays in this volume. A frontispiece in the Benedictional made for Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984, for example, seems at first glance to be entirely banal (London, BL, MS Add. 49598, fol. 70r; Fig. 1). The Lord enthroned within a double mandorla blessing with his right hand and proffering a book with the left is a commonplace of Carolingian and Ottonian manuscript illumination, invented as a way to imagine the Saviour’s dual nature; but it is hardly an adequate representation of the Triune God, the most complex of all Christian concepts, that the titulus, TRINITAS, claims for the Benedictional pictures. By complementing, contradicting, articulating, and obfuscating the figure, graphic elements compensate for the theological inadequacy by asserting God’s essential ineffability. The portrait generates what Ildar Garipzanov has called a ‘popup effect’; it anchors the reader’s gaze while, at the same time, revealing the image’s very incapacity to render the fundamental mystery of the ‘verus Deus’ who is, at one time, unus and trinus. Words, nomina sacra, a diagram, scale and hierarchy, materials, colour, and ornament not only prolong the experience of looking at the central figure of Christ in ways parallel to those which Benjamin Tilghman identifies in the Book of Kells, but also engender a rumination on God-made-man that simulates theological speculation on the complex understanding of the relationship of the Only Begotten Son to the Godhead. Operating like John the Evangelist’s metaphor of the caelum sicut liber involutus (Revelation 6:14), the illumination in Æthelwold’s Benedictional is thus the perfect paradigm for a concluding meditation on the essential issues comprehended by this collection of brilliant and important studies; it also introduces other matters that the authors do not discuss, or only touch on, and takes those matters beyond this book towards future application.

Nothing in the Benedictional’s singular Trinity composition is, in fact, single, and the very familiarity and repetition condition the reading of the miniature within the manuscript. Christ enthroned in a double mandorla, the lower orb enclosing his lap and legs and the one above it his upper torso, is derived from a Carolingian invention designed to deploy graphic means to convey the Saviour’s human and divine natures.

Reputation, Landmarks, and Crisis

By the end of 1931, the Quatuor Pro Arte had reached the full plateau of eminence; their ensemble was perfectly integrated, notable for precision and clarity. The four members played as one, instinctively, as a token of their total commitment to chamber music playing. Each of them undertook ventures (often as part of the group's concerts) into the realm of sonatas and occasional solo pieces. But they had long given up any sideline of orchestral playing, they no longer had to do theater theater work for subsistence, and their full commitment was to the group's identity and operations. They were more of a family to each other than they were to their own natural families.

All of them were married, and all but Onnou had children. Their balance of local performances in Brussels with relentless rounds of touring kept them exceedingly active from season to season. This became their burden: their travels on tight schedules strained the energies they wished to put into their performances, so as to sustain their group reputation. Yet they would attend postconcert receptions or linger to mingle with the audiences at the cost of reduced sleep before early departures the next mornings. As the years passed, the players could only spend a month at home in Brussels during the summers, and perhaps a brief time at Christmas. Otherwise, they consumed most of their lives “on the road,” living out of their luggage. Milhaud observed of their life that their schedule allowed them no time to visit the great museums and monuments of the European cities where they played: “They know only the concert hall, the train station, and the hotel room where they rehearse tirelessly.”

They were all in generally good health, and of mature ages. All but one of them (Onnou) were somewhat balding, prompting Tully Potter to call the group “Poirot Lunaire”—thereby committing a pun that combined the image of Agatha Christie's famous (balding) Belgian detective with the title of the Schoenberg work with which they were early involved.

We might well pause here to say something about these four men as individuals.

The city of Rome and its religious practices have been an important aspect of Joseph Dyer's scholarship, and the clarity of his work might lead the unwary to imagine that it is easy to find out information about the liturgy of the city. After all, almost all books of the ‘Roman’ liturgy claim in principle to represent the practice of the city itself. More often than not, though, they represent aspects of the Roman liturgy as their scribes perceive it, mixed with a good measure of their local practice. This is what makes the study of manuscripts and of liturgy interesting, of course, but it creates special problems with regard to the city of Rome. In what follows, I have tried to gather the evidence that survives from Roman books themselves — books made for and used in the city of Rome — along with other material that has some bearing on the problem, in an attempt to sketch a single important moment in the liturgical year of the Roman church. I propose to consider Holy Saturday at about the time of our surviving liturgical manuscripts of the city, from the eleventh century to the codification of the liturgy in the thirteenth. I hope that this study may contribute something to an understanding of the problems involved in research on Rome and to a larger picture of the liturgical and ceremonial life of the city itself, as distinct from the Roman liturgy in the larger sense.

The study of any single day in Rome is a challenge, but Holy Saturday is particularly complex, because it is not one thing but many, and because it involves not a single ceremony but the activities of a whole city. The rites of Holy Saturday are many; even if we disregard the Divine Office, said on Holy Saturday as every other day, the solemn rites of the Paschal Vigil are an amalgam of ceremonies arising from different needs and at different times.

The Paschal Vigil has four elements, each of which deserves a study of its own, and some have received a lot of attention:

Early medieval manuscripts were almost always parchment/vellum codices, normally consisting of gatherings that are often also called quires. From an early date the quires to be assembled were marked with a numeral or a letter, which helped assure that the gatherings would be bound in the proper order. Insofar as I know, such quire marks are a feature peculiar to the codex form, since rolls would never be in danger of incorrect assembly. This chapter addresses the form, and especially the decoration, of the quire marks in some early medieval Latin manuscripts, and possible analogues for these marks used as verse dividers in early manuscripts of the Qur’an.

Hitherto, decorated quire marks have received almost no attention from scholars, and are seldom reproduced or even described. Maria Luisa Agati in her 2009 book on comparative codicology mentioned that some were decorated, ‘ornate con motive decorative o figurali’ (ornamented with decorative or figural motifs), but says nothing further. Mildred Budny notes that some quire marks had decorative frames, which ‘contribute to the enduring mise-en-page of the book’, but gives no examples or further discussion. Indeed, I know of no study of quire marks at all, not a single article or book chapter devoted to them, whether decorated or not.

An Eugippius manuscript in Paris, BnF, lat. 2110, penned in half uncial script, provides good examples of the simplest type of quire mark, just a number. The marks consist of a letter q or Q – an abbreviation for quaternion – followed by a Roman numeral. Although in earlier Latin manuscripts these quire marks were often in the bottom right of the last leaf of the quire, by the seventh century they were most commonly located in the centre of the lower margin. Earlier manuscripts had placed the quire number elsewhere (in the earliest manuscripts from the fifth century it was often in the inner margin), where it was less obtrusive. Sometimes a letter would be used rather than a numeral. In the Eugippius manuscript the quire mark was in some instances associated with significant decoration, for example a finispiece for a section of text, but the association of decoration and quire mark is in that instance merely a coincidence. However, already by the sixth, or at latest seventh, century the quire marks sometimes receive wholly unnecessary decorative motifs.

In this essay, I consider the integration of the Maiestas image into gospel books from the ninth-century scriptorium at Tours, with a particular focus on the questions of ‘graphicacy’ at issue in this collection. I examine how the Maiestas – a powerful visual motif that is equally powerful as a theological concept – may be incorporated into a gospel programme through the play between textual, graphic and figural elements in a manuscript’s design. I will consider several specific cases in order to explore the following fundamental premises. Illumination may be broadly defined as an element of manuscript production that works to represent the contents and nature of a book. Drawing or painting provides a visual register in which to frame concepts thought to express the fusion between a text and its manuscript form. As such, the work of gospel-book illumination – broadly speaking – is to represent particular books in terms dependent on the nature of the gospel genre. Graphic and figural registers of decoration constitute discrete but interconnected visual systems of signification within a manuscript. Either or both may be marshalled to craft a programme of illumination that represents a particular book; and either or both may be implicated in the way an image type like the Maiestas is incorporated into the gospel genre. The way an image such as the Maiestas functions is likewise dependent on its context. The nature and argument of any one iteration of the type are defined through factors of medium, placement, and manuscript genre as much as through the specifics of composition.

I proceed from the further premise that the fundamental structure of the Maiestas composition – regardless of the particulars of any one image – is in itself recognizable and meaningful. This point is worth stating because it speaks directly to the core concept of this volume. Processes of production and reception intersect within the category of graphicacy, and the way I propose to discuss the Maiestas within gospel books involves negotiating issues that arise in both the construction and the interpretation of images. The volume as a whole is dedicated to the idea that the visual qualities of writing and decoration form avenues by which books may be made to communicate conceptual information.

In the art of late Antiquity and the early medieval period, the figure of Christ often appears in the form of ‘God with the book’ (Fig. 1). The literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius was one of the first to emphasize the particularity of this pictorial formula, identifying the significant difference between it and depictions of divinities from pagan Antiquity. Given the central role of Christ’s image in the visual culture of pre-modern Christianity, and in particular in Christian debates about the status of religious images, this observation is crucial. Yet somewhat surprisingly, the book has never played a major role in art-historical discussion of the depiction of Christ. The focus has been on the depiction of Christ in terms of his bodily appearance, with the result that the intimate symbiosis between Christ and the book has been left out of the equation. Since Christ himself was conceived as incarnate Logos or verbum, the book’s relation to him is neither metonymical nor metaphorical but ‘mediological’: body and book were both media of the Christian God. To put it more pointedly, it could be said that in such images, the changing countenance of the book formed the counterpart to the changing countenance of Christ’s body.

Initially still in scroll format, the book soon assumed codex form, affording new possibilities to distinguish between the closed and open book, between exterior and interior. Where an open book was shown, its interior provided a space in which to incorporate text. The writing allowed the book to speak and, through the book, gave a voice to Christ. In contrast, rather different features appear as hallmarks of the closed book’s exterior. Instead of scripture, geometric patterns predominate: the quincunx, the St Andrew’s cross and the orthogonal cross. The graphic schemata on the closed book are deployed as the Other of writing, in precisely the sense suggested by the conception of ‘graphicacy’ in this volume. This raises two questions: how is this design of the exterior of the codex, its cover, related to the idea of Christ as being ‘God with the book’?; and how do the book covers in such depictions relate to the actual bindings of medieval books? I would like to address these two questions by examining the genre of liturgical books with treasure bindings.