Paris Psalter

For the third copy of the Utrecht Psalter. produced in England in the late 12th century, see Great Canterbury Psalter.
David Composing the Psalms
(folio 1v) 36 x 26 cm
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale

The Paris Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. gr. 139), designated by siglum 1133 (Rahlfs), is a Byzantine illuminated manuscript containing 449 folios and 14 full-page miniatures "in a grand, almost classical style", as the Encyclopædia Britannica put it. Together with Basil I's Homilies of St Gregory Nazianzus, the Paris Psalter is considered a key monument of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance in Byzantine art during the 10th century.

The discovery that images such as David composing the psalms surrounded by personifications were clearly derived from Greco-Roman wall painting led 19th-century scholars to date the manuscript to the early 6th century. In the early 20th century, however, Hugo Buchthal and Kurt Weitzmann, took issue with the Late Antique dating, conclusively demonstrating that the fully realized, confident classicism and illusionism of the miniatures were the product of the 10th century, thereby extending the persistence of classical art in Byzantium into the Middle Ages.[1][2]

Miniatures

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Buchthal, Hugo (1938). The Miniatures of the Paris Psalter, a Study in Middle Byzantine Painting. London: Warburg Institute.
  2. ↑ Weitzmann, Kurt (1929). "Der Pariser Psalter". Jahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft.

References

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