ART REVIEW : Illuminated Manuscripts From Hebrew Texts

Skirball Museum of Hebrew Union College hosts the nationally touring “A Visual Testimony: Judaica From the Vatican Library.” Culled from the Vatican’s impressive cache of ancient Hebrew texts, the exhibition (through April 10) offers a look at 57 rare Jewish illuminated manuscripts dating from the 8th to the 18th centuries.

Illuminated manuscripts usually put us in mind of weary-eyed Christian monks painstakingly depicting scenes from the life of Christ. But this delicate, versatile genre also found its way into Jewish religion and culture as medieval Hebrew rabbis, scholars and scribes used hand-painted pages to embellish synagogue communal bibles, diminutive psalters, rabbinical commentaries and treatises on law and medicine.

A historical treat, the exhibition samples manuscripts by the “pillars” of Judaic thought, including Moses Maimonides, a revered 12th-Century rabbi, physician and mystic, and the so called “Rashi,” an 11th-Century sage whose teachings still fuel contemporary Jewish education.

A visual treat, the exhibition offers examples of manuscript illumination at its finest and shows an interesting aesthetic symbiosis between Hebrew artisans and the Celtic-Carolingian tradition of manuscript illumination.

Text is often lost in gilded tendrils, decorative borders and menageries of tiny ibexes, lions and other medieval beasts. Some manuscripts deliver the exaggerated, almost caricatured figures that give illumination its special intensity and charm. Others, mostly from the 15th Century on, show a dialogue with the Renaissance via passages of illusionistic space and volumetric modeling.

In a 14th-Century translation of the text, “Greater Book of Surgery,” tiny script is dwarfed by an elaborate floral arch that contains fantastic animals and a seated physician administering to a robed man. From a 15th-Century legal codex by the scholar Jacob Ben Asher, outlining everything from prayer to dietary rules to civil code, we see a beautiful, vividly hued synagogue scene with weighty Giotto-esque figures praying in a stagelike recessional space.

Up to now, only hard-boiled scholars trekking to the Vatican could view these manuscripts. Now we all get a glimpse of this fascinating trove.