Grossmont College Illuminated Manuscript Discussion Summary

Discussion summary

1. Select one artwork from this week textbook reading assignment, from one of the following media catagories:
   1. Illuminated Manuscript
   2. Freestanding Sculpture
   3. Relief Sculpture
   4. Church Architecture
2. Provide a detailed visual analysis of your selected artwork or monument.
   1. In your visual analysis, describe the lines, colors, shapes, patterns, light, contrast, perspective, scale, etc. in as much detail as possible to give your reader a good idea of the overall visual composition.
3. Provide an explanation of how the medium helps to reveal its intended audience, purpose, use, and meaning for its cultural, historical, and religious context.
   1. In your explanation, be sure to discuss how the materials and techniques work to accomplish specific visual effects and thematic meanings for its audience. Your explanation should answer the following questions:
      1. What is it about the usual size, placement, style, color, texture, etc. of this specific artform that helped it to deliver its intended message(s) and meaning(s) to its viewers at the time and place it was made?
      2. Who do you think would have seen this work and how would they have encountered it?
      3. Why do the visual and physical features of this specific type of media seem effective within the time and place of Early Medieval Europe?

Uta Codex

Another lectionary ( FIG. 11-33 ), one of the finest Ottonian books produced for the clergy, as opposed to the imperial court, was the work of scribes and illuminators at Regensburg. Their patron was Uta, abbess of Niedermünster from 1003 to 1025, a leading nun well known in royal circles. Uta was instrumental in bringing Benedictine reforms to the Niedermünster convent, whose nuns were usually the daughters of the local nobility. Near the end of her life, she presented the nunnery with a sumptuous manuscript containing many full-page illuminations interspersed with Gospel readings, the so-called Uta Codex. The lectionary’s case, fashioned of gold with jeweled and enamel decoration, also survives.

The dedicatory page ( FIG. 11-33 ) at the front of the Uta Codex depicts the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child in her lap in the central medallion. Labeled Virgo Virginum , Virgin of Virgins, Mary is the model for Uta and the Niedermünster nuns. Uta is the full-length figure presenting a new book—this book—to the Virgin. An inscription accompanies the dedicatory image: “Virgin Mother of God, happy because of the divine Child, receive the votive offerings of your Uta of ready service.” * The artist painted Uta last, superimposing her figure upon the design and carefully placing it so that Uta’s head touches the Virgin’s medallion but does not penetrate it, suggesting the interplay between, but also the separation of, the divine and human realms.

In many respects, the Uta Codex is more typical of the earlier medieval period and the succeeding Romanesque and Gothic eras than are the artworks and buildings commissioned by the Carolingian and Ottonian emperors. The Roman Empire, in revived form, may have lived on to 1002 at Otto III’s court in Rome, but after Henry II’s death in 1024, Rome’s influence waned. Romanesque Europe found unity not politically but in a shared religious fervor, manifested most clearly in the launching of crusades to free the Holy Land from Muslim control (see “ The Crusades ”).