Marina Warner reviews The Book of Miracles, which collects 15th- and 16th-century images of “pious episodes from the Bible … mixed with dazzling, bold paintings that could have come from a scientific treatise on astronomy”:
The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer.
Warner highlights the image seen above:
This tremendous picture of a hailstorm on May 17, 1552, over the town of Dordrecht, gives a terminus post quem for the manuscript, as it is the last dated wonder reproduced in the book. The subsequent pages depict scenes of divine retribution from Revelation; in this way reports of strange phenomena are firmly bookended by scripture, and the possibly profane appetite for bizarre and singular occurrences acquires a degree of legitimacy, being directed at the acts of all-seeing and all-powerful providence, and not at the marvelous vagaries of nature.
Previous Dish on the book here.
(Image courtesy of Taschen)
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