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Drawings by anonymous men on elegantly scripted volumes, mostly in black or brown, Ordinarily, the word parchment stands for the skin of sheep, goats, etc. which was prepared for use in the medieval age as a material on which to write but, over a period of time, it also came to mean a stiff, off-white paper resembling this material. It is perhaps in both these senses that the term was used in the title of a splendid, and much-talked about, exhibition — "Pen and Parchment" — that was mounted last year at the famed Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Described by one art critic as "a knockout, at once sumptuous and restrained", the show was essentially aimed at ‘re-framing’ the place of drawing in the history of European art. The curator of the show, Melanie Holcomb, gathered books and manuscripts from far-ranging sources in Europe and the United States — museums, libraries, religious institutions, private individuals — and put them together to draw attention to one of "the signal achievements of the Middle ages": drawings made by anonymous men on the pages of elegantly scripted volumes, but mostly in single colour, black or brown; obviously humbler fare compared to the dazzling, jewel-like coloured work in illuminated manuscripts that one knows all too well. Humbler but, in its own fashion, deeply moving. One of the objects of the exhibition was to "go beyond the delicious formality of the illuminated manuscript", and, as the curator put it, "to make visible the work of medieval draftsmen, to sort out its myriad forms and uses, and to highlight where and when drawing was especially resonant as an aesthetic choice." I did not get to see the exhibition myself, but the descriptions of what was on view are enticing. There were as many as 50 volumes on view drawn from all over the western world, spanning a period of five centuries, roughly from the ninth to the 14th century: Gospels, Psalters — Biblical books of Psalms, in other words — the Book of Hours, early maps, medical treatises, teaching scrolls, genealogical charts, constellation charts and cosmological texts, among others. Since most of the works were in the form of bound volumes, the plan followed was to periodically, at the beginning of each month, in fact, turn the pages of each volume, so that an ever-changing variety of images could come into view. There were famous works in the show: thus, a volume of the Chronica Majora or Great Chronicle, dated around 1240, from the Corpus Christi Library at Cambridge, in which the artist has entered a year-by-year entry of significant historical events, accompanied by an extensive set of marginal pictures; the drawings, now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican, of an eccentric Italian cleric, who was at the court of the Pope at Avignon; St. Dunstan’s Classbook, with the well-known image of the tiny monk Dunstan bowing before the massive figure of Christ; an exquisite ink rendering of a facade of the Strasbourg Cathedral from around 1260. On view were singulaly moving drawings, like the one in which a crowd stands around the crucified figure of Christ, the artist succeeding in capturing, using only simple draftsman’s tools, "all the turmoil of twisted bodies, upturned necks, and outstretched hands." Among the many fascinating manuscripts was a plate containing very full autobiographical notes covering the first 40 years of an author: "a rare piece from an age not rich in autobiographies". The notes, a description of which was offered, are in "a most peculiar arrangement: they are inscribed into a scheme of 40 concentric rings each of which corresponds to one year in the author’s life. A calendar ring surrounding the whole system gives every single day its fixed place within the scheme."Precision and imagination; ‘fantastic traceries of layered images and drawings’: it must have been quite a show. I am convinced that much of this would not mean anything to most of us, largely because those names, those texts, that whole world, in fact, is too far from us: distant, if not completely alien. But two things that the Metropolitan exhibition focussed upon would find resonance in several minds here: one, the emphasis on the sheer quality of the line in the drawings that adorned those medieval manuscripts; and, two, the set of issues connected with the general anonymity of those artists. The quality of line in pre-Renaissance works had always been played down when juxtaposed with that seen in the work of the legendary artists of the Renaissance: this exhibition questioned those judgments and those prejudices by drawing attention to the intrinsic strength, the lyric eloquence, of line in these early works. And by extracting names from these manuscripts — Matthew Paris of St. Albans Abbey, for instance, or Opicinus de Canistris of the Papal court at Avignon — the show forcefully drew attention to the fact that in these drawings, too, there is intense personal self-expression, even if it was in service to the divine. Reading about these things inevitably puts one in mind of our own situation, for somewhere, in our study of Indian art, similar, if not identical, issues keep surfacing. One thing is certain, though. The quality of line in Indian art has never been in question: from the earliest times to our own. In countless works, the line sings and soars. One has only to look at some of the earliest manuscript illustrations, some going back to the 12th century — like those from the Pala period in the east, or from Gujarat and Rajasthan in the west — to sense the sheer elegance of the line. At places, it is so sure, so taut, as to give the feeling that it might snap and crackle and break if pushed even slightly beyond the point reached in it. And then, as far as anonymity in art goes, much current scholarship is occupied with discovering, if not exactly identifying, the artist who lurked in the shadows of his own work. Names are being gathered; some biographies re-constructed; mindsets probed. Of all this, however, another time. Meanwhile, with excitement one celebrates the fact of the portraits of some painters and calligraphers having survived the ravages of time. Like the Mughal portrait of a venerable old calligrapher who sits — eyes sharply focussed, face all intensity — ‘parchment’ in hand, pen poised to write on it. The work is seductive, almost irresistible. A footnote Just in case someone is
interested, "Pen and Parchment" is the name of a theology
blog on the internet; a company bearing this very name produces
personalised stationery and gifts; and there is famous pub of this
name located, appropriately, at Shakespeare’s birthplace: Stratford
upon Avon in England.
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