De Natura Avium; De Pastoribus et Ovibus; Bestiarium; Mirabilia Mundi; Philosophia Mundi; On the Soul
Getty Conversations

0:00:02.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Manuscript Study Center at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, standing in front of this magnificent book. In fact, it was meant for education, but it’s not like any textbook I’ve ever used.

0:00:19.2 Dr. Kristen Collins: Medieval collections are always a bit of a puzzle when you are looking at a book and trying to figure out the reasons why certain texts would’ve been put together. We have here a book made in 1277. It contains several different texts. One of the texts is on the nature of birds. It also contains a bestiary. Both of these are kind of moralizing tales that are attached to natural history, with lessons that relate to scripture. It also contains a text on the miracles of the world. All of these texts are bound together with a piece of a text by William of Conches from 100 years before this collection would’ve been put together. “Philosophia mundi,” “the philosophy of the world”—William of Conches was a natural philosopher. This was to say he was a medieval scientist. Natural philosophy was the study of the known world, including things on earth and in the cosmos.

0:01:23.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: But William of Conches was also interested in the things that we can’t see. He’s combining ancient Greek philosophy with more contemporary observations, all under the umbrella of Christianity.

0:01:36.4 Dr. Kristen Collins: But what we have to remember is underlying the beautiful lapis, the gold, is a diagrammatic language that was used by natural philosophers to express the complexities of the universe. They dealt in diagrams. The world and the universe were conceived of as spherical. What we see on the page is an earth-centered universe. The silver circle on the center of the page is the earth, and then what we see surrounding it are images of the moon. So what we are seeing is a kind of time lapse of the cycles of the moon. And over at the left side is a golden sphere representing the sun. So the artist is working out on the page the different cycles that the moon goes through as it orbits around the earth.

0:02:31.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: We see these marvelous drawings, hand-drawn like everything in this book, but we’re seeing the universe contained within these perfect squares, these perfect circles that define the orbits of the heavenly bodies. And although we know in the modern world that the earth is not in the center of the universe, and we see that here, there is an attempt to draw together the idea that comes from Plato that the universe is an ideal, that it is perfect, that it is based on a kind of perfect geometry. And while the focus is clearly on those heavenly bodies, I have to admit that I’m taken with the areas in between that negative space, of the blue with these wonderful white, almost swirling clouds. And then that dusty rose that frames the circle, which is both decorative but also prompts us to wonder what is there.

0:03:21.1 Dr. Kristen Collins: Plato, in the “Timaeus,” outlines the principles of the ordered universe that had been organized by a divine craftsman. So what this later illuminator has done with William’s writings, you can see some of that energy that is linking the universe represented in these sort of pulsating pink swirls of energy.

0:03:46.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’ve turned the page. If you look closely, you can see again the earth in the center, the sun on the edge, and then in one of the drawings, the smallest of the three bodies, the moon.

0:03:56.9 Dr. Kristen Collins: William knew that the moon did not emit light on its own, it reflected light, or in this case, absorbed it. And so these diagrams show him trying to work out the different cast shadows created by the earth, which would then obscure the moon. In his work, William talks about the conical shadow and the basket-shape shadow, both of which you can see on the right-hand page.

0:04:20.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s almost as if we’re looking at the mechanical workings of the universe.

0:04:26.2 Dr. Kristen Collins: This whole manuscript page opening is basically a study in how to figure out the mechanical workings that make the moon disappear. But William of Conches was working in the 12th century at a moment before the universities were in place. He was teaching in the cathedral school either of Paris or Chartres. And this meant that he was teaching for a learned class, an elite who are going to become clergy. So in the 12th century, the curriculum for natural philosophy had not been solidified, and William has only certain segments of Plato’s “Timaeus” that had been translated in the West, and those were the parts that dealt with the cosmos. So William writes with a somewhat arrogant tone about the fact that he is reading the writings of Constantine the African. Constantine was a doctor working at the University of Salerno. Constantine’s writings were not widely circulating at this moment, and yet William makes a very distinct point that he is reading them while others are not.

0:05:36.5 Dr. Kristen Collins: So little bits of learning from the Islamic world are filtering into Europe, but not the way that the landslide of new Arabic texts come into Europe in the 13th century. As an artifact, this book is something of a mishmash of medieval texts that don’t quite fit. The medieval bestiary, a book on the medieval aviary, on birds, and a text on the shepherd and the sheep. These are simple stories. Williams’ text is more erudite in the overall scheme. They’re all efforts by learned clerics to reconcile the natural world to a divinely ordered universe. It’s a funny pairing of texts that wind up together.

0:06:24.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: And yet this was an expensive book to produce. The hours of labor that were required by the scribe, the flock of animals that would’ve been required for the vellum, to say nothing of the labor of the artist who produced these illuminations and the material cost of the gold of the illumination. All of this is expensive, and so this is clearly learning that remained important in some way.

0:06:50.3 Dr. Kristen Collins: What’s wonderful when you look at this book, it is a luxury manuscript. It has lapis, gold, other pigments. It is lavishly illuminated throughout. It is a collector’s object. This book, created 150 years after these texts were written, really enshrines an earlier science. And for the wealthy owner, whether a cleric or a noble person, it showed that having a command of science was really to have command of your world.

Learn more about “Lumen: The Art & Science of Light”

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