![]() ![]() Wing’s arma Christi folio makes a point to be directly involved with the text. This may be why Wing chose to illuminate the Matins prayer. Wing’s border seems to critique the original border because the grotesques have nothing to do with the text. The original illuminator’s combination of God’s creation and tools suggests man’s appropriation of creation. I believe that the grotesques, in conversation with Wing’s arma Christi border, represent sins. ![]() Perhaps the intent of the original illuminator was to show off his art and imagination skills. My personal favorite is what I fondly call the “quail snail” in the top right corner. Some of the grotesques are mixings of real animals, with a strange fascination with snails. The grotesques of 68r are mish-mashings of animals and everyday man-made objects, like buckets, bellows, and bowls (oh, my!). The same can be said about the grotesque border, which Wing may have retouched although it is not specified the text is original. For Jesus to use man-made instruments to combat death, he has to address our evil ways and reclaim our cruel creations as his own to save us, ultimately transforming the instruments into good things. Every one of them was either created to be cruel or was used in a cruel way against Christ, suggesting that as creators, we are only capable of making harmful objects. The arma Christi are man-made, except for Peter’s rooster, although he is the reason the rooster crows. These instruments symbolized Christ’s triumph over death in the early Middle Ages, but by the twelfth century, they came to be “mementos” of the Passion for us to meditate on Jesus’s suffering (Cooper and Denny-Brown 5). On my latest count and consultation with The Arma Christi in Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture, I brought that number up to thirteen, with two obscure symbols making the total fifteen: the hay fork and three gold containers. From my initial count, I found four major symbols. Wing’s depiction of the arma Christi on 32r is almost like an Easter egg hunt - you have to find them all and figure out what parts of the Passion they’re referring to. It displays a variant of Wing’s floral and gold signature border. Another modern border by Wing, 71v, depicts the five wounds of Christ and ends the entire section of the Passion, coming just before the Mass of the Five Wounds. 32r and 68r act essentially as book-ends as they start the first and last hours, but this isn’t where our picture story ends. 68r, an original border ending the Hours with Compline, shows grotesques dancing around the text. ![]() On 32r, Wing illuminates the arma Christi, instruments used in Christ’s torture this folio correlates to the hour of Matins, opening the Hours of the Passion. I’ll be looking at three different border illuminations that tell Jesus’s Passion through illustration and order, and I’ll tackle it in order. Wing’s floral imagery will be important to the Hours of the Passion’s illumination framework.īefore we go any further discussing Wing’s borders, a couple of things need to be noted. Through these examples and other borders of MS W.441, we can see that he utilizes bright colors and subtle shadowing to make these lifelike images pop. Wing’s artistic calling card is beautiful floral illuminations on striking gold backgrounds. In addition to MS W.441, he illuminated borders for Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 193, and Yale, Beinecke MS 287A, only a few on a list of his contributions. ![]() He also worked for other commissioners as a professional facsimilist, and a pretty convincing one at that (Furlong 7). Wing was no stranger to working with medieval manuscripts, even “damaged surviving manuscripts,” for Jarman (Backhouse 80). William Caleb Wing, the talented modern illuminator of this manuscript, engaged with original medieval borders to create border illuminations and full-page miniatures. Many of these pretty illuminations, however, were commissioned by John Boykett Jarman in the nineteenth century. Īccording to the manuscript description, the text was written in the sixteenth century in Flanders. The second major deviation in this manuscript is the illuminations. MS W.441 instead centers around the Hours of the Passion, making it more Christ-based (for more on this absence in manuscripts, see Christian Gallichio’s post ). For one, this Book of Hours lacks the very thing that makes Books of Hours what they are: the Hours of the Virgin (Weick 60 Reinburg 209). Welcome to the strangeness of Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery MS W.441 ! A few things set this manuscript apart from the everyday Book of Hours. ![]()
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