letmypeopleshow: Everything is Illuminated: A dog chases a hare amidst a profusion of fantastical cr
letmypeopleshow: Everything is Illuminated: A dog chases a hare amidst a profusion of fantastical creatures and Gothic forms in the grammatical treatise that accompanies the Cervera Bible, a masterpiece of illumination made in Spain from 1299-1300. The Bible is on loan from Lisbon’s National Library to the Metropolitan of Art, joining two other medieval Hebrew Bibles also on loan–one from Germany in the medieval department, and another from Spain in the newly inaugurated space for Art of the Arab Lands. This apparently unprecedented circumstance reflects, in part, the museum’s increasing effort to include Jewish objects in the narrative of art history its permanent-collection galleries tell. Scholars are divided over whether animals in hunt scenes like this one had a symbolic meaning for Jews in Spain–of persecution or escape, for example–or whether they were purely decorative. “Sometimes a crossbow is just a crossbow,” one curator told me. So what about the dragons? Read more in my new article in Tablet. -- source link