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Leaves from a Beatus Manuscript
Spain (Burgos), ca. 1180
Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment; each folio approx. 17 5/8 x 11 7/8 in. (44.8 x 30.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Cloisters Collection, Rogers and Harris Brisbane Dick Funds, and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1991 (1991.232.1, .10)

Curator Comment

There are few opportunities to acquire manuscripts that match the standard set by The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux and The Belles Heures of Jean de Berry, which the Museum acquired in 1954. The fourteen leaves from a Beatus manuscript acquired in 1991, of which two are exhibited here, are inventive masterpieces of illumination that met that challenge, and that, moreover, resonate with the department's other holdings from medieval Spain. These paintings bring to life an extraordinary vision of the end of the world, recorded by Saint John in the Apocalypse and filtered through the lens of Beatus of Liébana, an eighth-century Asturian monk. On the frontispiece, angels and a lamb representing Christ appear beneath an imposing gold cross. But in another, nightmarish illustration of Saint John's vision, angels sound golden horns; while the sun and stars bursting with brilliant gold appear in a lapis band, as plagues of locusts fall from the sky. Each leaf exemplifies the artist's ability to adapt conventions for the rendering of clothing or architecture to the exigencies of illustrating an imaginative text.

Barbara Drake Boehm, curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters