alpine_thistle

picard, 10 months ago to medievodons

The Daily Art app this week featured this fascinating, beautiful illuminated manuscript. I felt like it was worth sharing.

The illumination is from northern Ethiopia, some time around the late 14th or early 15th century.

The style is somewhat reminiscent of Eastern / Orthodox / Byzantine style, but obviously quite different too.

The writing around the edge is apparently Ge'ez - old Ethiopian church language. But I believe the script (or a derivation thereof) is used in modern Amharic.

I'm unsure of Daily Art's subscription model now (I've an old lifetime subscription from before they changed it), but I think it still has some free tier. It's a great way to see art from around the world, in styles you might not otherwise encounter.

https://www.getdailyart.com/en/24503/unknown-artist/illuminated-gospel

Editing this post to add a bit more context - so sorry for multiple edit notifications the server here is a bit overwhelmed today - big thanks to @alpine_thistle and @jlundell for providing some great additional information! It was all new to me but really interesting, and might interest others reading this too.

The four winged figures surrounding Jesus are the four Gospels - those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - represented as animal forms: a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (respectively). These are traditional representations of the four Gospels; Ezekiel 1:10 includes references to a vision of these four figures. More information about this, and why those particular representations over on Aleteia: https://aleteia.org/2016/12/27/do-you-know-the-meanings-of-the-creatures-in-the-tetramorph

And a great resource for seeing more of the pages from this manuscript (there were 20 in total) on the Metropolitan Museum of Art site: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/317618

@medievodons @histodons

#Ethiopia #Africa #Art #MedievalArt #Illumination #Manuscripts #IlluminatedManuscripts #Christianity

alpine_thistle, 11 months ago to random

"It is characteristic of economically complex and socially sophisticated societies to remember their humble origins nostalgically or to envy the simpler life of country dwellers; this tendency is observable in almost every urban society from 9th-century Baghdad to 20th-century America. Romans writing under the Empire often indulged in such feelings regarding the smaller and simpler Rome of the Republic and imagined that it had been a time of 'purity' in politics and personal morality."