Beatus de Liébana, Commentaries on the Apocalypse of John and the Book of Daniel

Close to a hundred brightly coloured images, coupled with a surprisingly “modern” —certainly to the contemporary eye—stylisation accompany the famous Commentary on the Apocalypse, written in Asturias (Spain) by the monk known as Beatus during the last quarter of the 8th century.  A landmark in the Western canon of Johannique Christology but also in the field of medieval iconography, its vast influence permeated illustrated manuscripts from the late 9th century to the early 13th. But of the twenty or so copies in conservation today, only the Beatus of Saint Sever was written north of the Pyrenees, in the Romanesque scriptorium of the Saint-Sever abbey, under the directorship of Grégoire de Montaner (1028-1072). The representation of the church in Les Landes on the world map (f. 45bis-45 ter) and the mention of a certain Gregorius, abba nobilis in f. 1 affirm the supposition. Equally astonishing is that a certain Stephanus Garsia Placidus chose to include his name to the codex that shows the presence of four different artists and three different handwritings. Two painters thus collaborated on the sober painting of the Adoration of Christ by the Angels, the Twenty Four Old People and the Four Living (f. 121v-122) which present certain analogies to the tympanum of the Moissac abbey (Tarn-et-Garonne, towards 1125). In a blend of tradition and modernity, we see Romanesque traits combined with a Mozarabic graphical style developed by the Christians in Moorish Spain, making for a truly successful synthesis of multi-cultural elements—in time as well as space: the influence of antiquity in the monumentality of the Adoration of the Mages (f. 12) combined with the simplification of form to evoke mountains (f. 51v). The animals symbolising the great Empires (f. 51) are not specifically Hispanic. Like the feudal soldier-like figures mounted on evil steeds (f. 148v), they have close antecedents in the illustration of the De rerum naturis by Raban Maur, created around 1030 at Mont-Cassin. There are Western influences too—the page resembling a carpet of Saxon-Frankish interlaced designs (f.26), while the frieze of bushes with birds (f. 52v) or the wild beasts enclosed within medallions (f. 198) have echoes of Sassanid art. The more northern physiognomy of triumphant Babylon (f.52v) is framed within a classical Roman architecture (f. 145). The victims of diabolical grasshoppers (f. 145v) with their sphinx heads thrash about on a ground of colourful checkers like Roman jugglers. On the other hand, the magnificent full page miniature showing the fight between the Divine Bird and the Serpent takes its inspiration from an old Oriental legend taken up and exploited by Christian exegesis (f. 13). And lastly, Celestial Jerusalem, with its quadrangular structure, manifests an inside geometry in its use of a typically Romanesque combined perspective that lets us see the hieratic figures of the apostles standing under the blind arcade of arches.