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A film made for Tyniec, as part of a temporary exhibition, “In the monastery scriptorium”

For this beautiful exhibition, a film was made that briefly describes how a manuscript illuminated leaf was created.

 

For this project we chose a leaf with the beginning of Psalm 1, which is decorated with the illuminated initial ‘B’. The film shows the subsequent stages of the work: cutting the parchment and preparing it for writing and painting; hand-cutting the pen, ruling the pages, preparing pigments, writing text with a goose quill, gilding, and finally illuminating the entire leaf.

 

The film was directed and produced by Marcin Gęsiarz, in record time. It was a great work that we did together in Tyniec Abbey. The film accompanies a temporary exhibition at the monastery.

 

The Foundation Chronić Dobro encourages visitors to see the exhibition in the monastery in Tyniec:

 

For centuries, in the monastic scriptoria, a truly “Benedictine work” has been performed, requiring a great deal of patience and accuracy from the scribes. On the one hand, it was a prestigious work as it required highly valued skills and left a lasting effect. For this reason https://www.intercultural-reflections.de/character-t/index.html , it was recommended that only humble monks should become scribes. On the other hand, it was a tiring work that was complained about, even on the margins of the rewritten works, as in the famous, preserved words: “three fingers work, and the whole body is at pains”.

 

During the complicated history of Europe, through wars and fires, monastic libraries proved to be the most faithful depository of knowledge and kept books until the invention of printing and subsequent technologies which allowed unlimited reproduction of text.

 

Nowadays, having such easy and cheap access to the written word, can we still appreciate the work of medieval scribes and their legacy?

 

The exhibition was held betwee 26 April – 5 April 2019.

 

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