The frontispiece of the Vivian Bible, a huge, lavishly adorned one-volume Bible that was gifted to Charles the Bald in 845 by the abbot, Count Vivian, and the monks of the abbey of St. Martin at Tours, is depicted in the illustration. The miniature shows how St. Jerome translated the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into Latin in the latter part of the fourth century. It tells the tale of the creation of the Word using pictures.
Tituli divide the page into three horizontal zones, or registers. There are two scenes in the upper register, but they are not as well separated from one another as they would be in a contemporary pictorial narrative like a comic book. Jerome is shown on the left getting ready to leave Rome and head to Jerusalem to study Hebrew on a boat. Jerome gives his Hebrew teacher some coins in the scene on the right. As a result, the saint makes two appearances in what appears to be one graphic space. Surprisingly to us, this type of representation was quite popular in the early Middle Ages and didn’t seem to confuse medieval viewers. By using the identical facial characteristics, tonsured head, and golden halo to depict the saint twice, the artist has highlighted that Jerome is represented twice. This halo is specific to Jerome and helps the reader recognize him right away throughout the page.
There is just one scenario in the second register. Paula and her daughter Eustochium are two saintly ladies to whom Jerome, in the middle, discusses his translation of the Bible. This image is very much about writing and books. A book is open between Jerome and the most prominent of the holy women, and both of them hold books on their laps. The two scribes writing behind the saint are one writing on a scroll and the other in a book. The secretary behind the saint uses a stylus to record notes on a wax tablet. (This last fact is a stunningly exact historical detail: the codex, the modern book form, superseded the archaic scroll precisely in the fourth century, the era seen in the miniature.) A female writer also writes on a roll at the far left. The need for precise texts as a result of the Carolingian Renaissance’s educational reforms led to a strong curiosity about the creation of specific texts, which is reflected in the frontispiece of the Vivian Bible. Given the relative importance of words and images in the ninth century, it is noteworthy that there was no comparable Carolingian preoccupation with the genesis of images.
The creation and dissemination of the Word are the focus of the miniature’s third register, just as they were of the first two. Once more enthroned in the center, Jerome retrieves copies of his Bible translation from chests on either side of him and gives them to tonsured monks. The monks then carry the volumes into what are most likely intended to be representations of the churches throughout Christendom.
The advantages and disadvantages of pictorial storytelling are aptly demonstrated by this frontispiece. Positively, the artist is able to designate the most significant characters in the plot using a range of easily recognized signals. The saint is clearly the main focus, as shown by his halo and his placement in the middle of the second and third registers. Jerome’s prominence is further indicated by the repetition. But there are boundaries to pictorial narrative.
The most significant is that photographs cannot effectively convey complex stories without words; they cannot make the generalizations that are essential to narrative. This miniature in the Jerome frontispiece would not be able to speak if not for the tituli underneath the miniatures and my lengthy exegesis in the previous few paragraphs. It would be impossible to determine that the man with Jerome in the upper right-hand scene is his Hebrew instructor, or that the holy women are Paula and Eustochium, without text. While they can complement and grow upon books, narrative images cannot replace written works of literature.
Pictures would be uninteresting if Gregory the Great was correct and they were just fake books. If early medieval art only reproduced what was found in early medieval texts, we would probably not be interested in studying it. When revealed truth appeared in the shape of a text during the word-dominated Middle Ages, many visuals attempted to mimic writing. However, not all early medieval artwork tells a straightforward story. Additionally, there are more intricate, frequently nonnarrative visuals that use only visual cues to communicate information that texts are unable to. These pictures, which are the focus of the remainder of this chapter, demonstrate how meaning was created in early medieval art through a multifaceted process that was not adequately explained by Gregory the Great’s rule. Images from the early Middle Ages could be books written by the illiterate, but they could also be much more.
There are certain nontextual characteristics in the Jerome frontispiece from the Vivian Bible. For instance, Jerome’s prominence is immediately apparent due to his halo and central location. The rapid impact of the visual would be lost if the message suggested by these indicators were to be expressed vocally in a long text that would take a long time to read or hear. The intricacy and diversity of visual cues are boundless. Although haloes and centrality are quite basic, the Vivian Bible frontispiece also has more subtle clues. In the bottom zone, Jerome is seated on a unique type of chair—a folding stool with crossed legs and lion heads at the ends of its arms—instead of a bench, as he is in the second register. Judges and kings in the early Middle Ages carried this stool, called a sella curulis. Jerome is recognized as a lawgiver by this graphic detail, with his interpretation of the Bible being taken to be the law.
Early Middle Ages artists employed a variety of totally nonnarrative techniques in addition to the introduction of visual aspects within narrative illustrations to create meaning. Typology was among the most significant of these. Typology is a particularly Christian interpretation of the Bible, based on the idea that the Old Testament foreshadows the New. Christ himself employed this kind of interpretation when He spoke the words, “For just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, so shall the Son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.”