The St. John's Bible

Today we went down to Madison to visit the Chazen Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. It is a great museum, previously known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and underwent a major expansion and renaming about the time we moved up here. It is well worth a visit any time. Today we went down to view this special exhibition.

The St. John’s Bible is a hand-written and illuminated bible commissioned by the monks of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Celebrated calligrapher Donald Jackson and a team of scribes and illuminators completed the bible over a fifteen-year period employing techniques and materials that untold scribes before them used prior to the invention of the printing press.

 
The Saint John’s Bible is the first handwritten Bible that interprets and illustrates scripture from a contemporary perspective, reflecting a multicultural world and humanity’s enormous strides in science, technology and space travel.  It is also the first handwritten and illuminated Bible created in the past 500 years.

In the Benedictine tradition of inclusion, The Saint John’s Bible incorporates elements from the world religions, including Judaism and Islam, as well as influences from the Native American cultures in the Minnesota area. It also documents Minnesota as the birthplace of The Saint John’s Bible through illustrations of flora and fauna indigenous to the region. 

The seven volumes comprise 1,150 pages of calfskin vellum, the script is written using hand-cut goose, turkey and swan quills, and the ink is hand-ground lamp black from 19th century Chinese ink sticks. Egg tempera and gold leaf provide vivid color to the illuminations. The images reproduced here give you only a glimpse of the design. The actual pieces are amazingly bright and dimensional.

There was also an excellent video that described the process of conceiving and creating this work of art. Watching the calligraphers and artists at work made me appreciate how mind-bogglingly delicate it was to produce such beauty. I could only marvel at the amount of time devoted to the project and at the courage of the Benedictines and artists involved to commit to it.

Tom and I were both quite taken with the exhibition. Since the pages have not yet been bound, a great number of them were on display. I can't say enough about how beautiful it is. If you read or hear of it coming to a museum in your area, I highly recommend you see it.

Before we went to the museum, we stopped and had a very nice meal at P.F. Chang's. So thanks go out to Rich and Peggy for making that treat possible. It helped make the whole trip a special event.