The always interesting Public Domain Review has a post about a striking medieval manuscript:
As the seventh, final seal is opened during the Book of Revelation, unlocking the scroll that John of Patmos envisions in God’s right hand, a silence breaks out in heaven for half an hour. For centuries, artists have avoided depicting this apocalyptic caesura by focusing instead on the action-packed aftermath: thunder and lightning, the seven trumpets, hail and fire mingled with blood. From John Martin’s 1837 mezzotint of cataclysmic crags above turbulent seas back to Albrecht Dürer’s noisy 1511 woodcut of flames engulfing life like tinder, the “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour” is absent, implied only apophatically, as the converse of the chaos that now reigns over, and rains down upon, the earth.
This is not the case for a miniature from the twelfth-century Silos Apocalypse (British Library Add MS 11695, fol. 125v), a codex copy of the Tractatus de Apocalipsin, eighth-century Spanish theologian Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Book of Revelation. Here sonic absence is visualized, and it is yellow. Just as silence blankets the ears, in this manuscript, a monochromatic rectangle “serves as an effective screen that blocks the beholder’s gaze”, writes art historian Elina Gertsman. Auditory interruption gets transposed onto the textual plane, as the rectangle veils the ruled lines it floats above. “It’s not that yellow as a color ‘stands for’ silence according to medieval symbolic logic”, argues scholar Vincent Debiais, “it’s that the colored area on the page opens a visual moment, a space of silence within the manuscript itself.” The effect becomes all the more palpable when we consider that the manuscript may have been read aloud.
It can be tempting, despite scholarly reservations, to view this yellow silence as an early precursor to the color field abstractions and monochromatic paintings that preoccupied the mid-twentieth century. Rather than claiming that the Silos Apocalypse prefigures works like Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow (1956) or Yves Klein’s “Untitled Yellow Monochrome” (1956), it would be more productive (and interesting) to ask how those modern investigators of the chromosphere approached a type of representation that converged with medieval forms of contemplation. As Debiais writes, “It’s important to challenge the common idea of an almost evolutionary procession, where modernist abstract art is somehow the climax, a new and perfectly original approach to the visual world, absolutely different from all that preceded it.”
Links and (of course) an image of the miniature itself at the PDR post. The Wikipedia article on Beatus of Liébana’s work has Commentaria in Apocalypsin, which strikes me as better Latin than “de Apocalipsin,” but I Am Not a Latinist.
For the most part, the manuscript is illuminated in red and yellow, plus the black ink (one full spread uses a few other colors.) I’d say it’s yellow because it’s not red or black…
I get the impression this “scholar” has not the slightest idea what symbolic logic is.
It’s not tempting at all, unless you can show that Rothko etc. knew about this medieval manuscript.
That’s not what “precursor” means; something can run before you without your knowing about it.
despite scholarly reservations
“although it makes no sense”
The really impressive thing about mediaeval scholastic logic is that they achieved so much without symbols (though they did have mnemonics.)
“Symbolic logic” usually has the mathematical sense, as a fixed expression. However, the sense ‘the logic of symbols’, while rare, does appear. I understood what she meant.
The bit about the connection to modern abstract art does seem like a big ol’ elaborate strawman.
I don’t think it’s a strawman; it’s very common for people to look at some ancient thing they were unaware of and assimilate it to what they know.
“Tractatus de Apocalipsin” is unequivocally wrong. De takes the ablative.
There was some strange Latin around in the early Middle Ages (before Alcuin). Gregory of Tours even admitted that he hardly knew correct Latin.
A good pun. I approve.
Commentaria in strikes me as questionable Latin, considering commentarii de bello gallico for example; but in neatly avoids the problem that de requires the ablative, which Greek doesn’t have; so, as long as we’re declining apocalypsis in Greek (-n is Greek and not Latin), in is probably an improvement.
In Proper Latin, it’s not unusual to see Greek accusatives:
Pone sub curru nimium propinqui
Solis in terra domibus negata;
Dulce ridentem Lalagen amabo,
Dulce loquentem.
Or
Nunc et Anaxagorae scrutemur homoeomerian
quam Grai memorant nec nostra dicere lingua
concedit nobis patrii sermonis egestas,
sed tamen ipsam rem facilest exponere verbis.*
Not so much genitives (thus, Anaxagorae) or datives (or any plural forms.) Ablatives are given Latin endings.
* Take that, Sapir-Whorf!
Ex hypothesi …
De takes the ablative.
That’s what I thought, but I didn’t want to risk saying so. I could feel the shade of Brother Auger behind me tapping his hip with a ruler, waiting to strike…
Commentaria in strikes me as questionable Latin, considering commentarii de bello gallico for example
Actually, the two prepositions have different uses. commentarii de means “notes from / about” (an event, e.g., the Gaulish war), commentarii in means “notes / comments on” (an author or a work), so “in” with accusative is what applies in this case.
What is the source for this so common form of the title? The critical editions i could consult all say the book was called Bellum Gallicum (or Bellum Civile – Cynthia Damon’s recent edition has De bello civili on the title page, but she uses the bare Bellum Civile in her introduction), and that, or Libri Belli Gallici seems to be the title in the manuscripts. If commentarii is used, as on the title page of Klotz’s edition, it’s Commentarii Belli Gallici. It should be noted that commentarius here does not mean “commentary”; Georges has only one citation for that meaning, from Gellius (commentaria in Vergilium componere).
We had one of the books in our Latin reader in grade nine, and at the time I thought the title was De Bello Gallico Liber. Which made sense to me, but I probably just didn’t realize that there were eight books and there was a roman numeral I after the word Liber:
The really impressive thing about mediaeval scholastic logic is that they achieved so much without symbols (though they did have mnemonics.)
Makes perfect sense once you grok the coding scheme. And in symbolic reasoning, the initial letter of each syllogism was good enough. As a logic it’s just as powerful as Frege’s/Russell’s.
Revelation has seven seals and seven blessings. Seven days with a sabbath. The Sun can be blinding yellow.
Negative, apophatic, theology. Noumenal.
To pick a spectrum color for uninscribed parchment, yellow as a choice is brilliant.
Dixit quidam: “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken.”
Moreover, that’s commentarium (pl. -a), not commentarius (pl. -i), so the -um form is Classical and not a post-imperial barbarism as I figured. Maybe it was even commentarii de vs. commentaria in…?
Georges treats the two forms as synonyms, with commentarius being short for commentarius liber and commentarium for commentarium volumen, in other words, commentarius is originally an adjective. None of his examples is construed with de, there are several citations with the genitive (including commentarii belli gallici), and one with in with the meaning “commentary on”.
What is the source for this so common form of the title?
Good question. German WP says that sources from antiquity report that Caesar called his work Commentarii rerum gestarum Galliae or Commentarii Gallici belli, i.e., using the genitive and not de plus ablative.
Perhaps it was simply the analogy to all those other works with De-titles — De re publica, De rerum natura, De viris illustribus (with the full title adding liber/libri and, if needed, a number) — that led to Caesars Commentarii being called De bello gallico/De bello civili. Although there is the question how authentic those other De-titles are.
Speaking of precursoration, I believe there’s at least one page in Tristram Shandy that is blacked out. I can’t remember whether it indicates silence or a lewd subject that Sterne spares the reader from seeing.
Printing was strictly monochrome in those days so it would have been impossible to insert a yellowed out page.
The Black Page.
And this ‘cancelled’ portrait, used for the Oxford Classics edition of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/143064844814, and explained here: https://jamesmulraine.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/old-story-found-true-and-false-the-peculiar-life-of-thomas-rennell-painter/
Revelation belonging in the canon was not unanimous. Some earlier diverse views among Jews continued into the New Testament. Some sectarian, Essene, Dead Sea Scrolls portray Pharisees, there called Ephraim, negatively.
At least, i joined those who think so, adding that Revelation was also anti-Pharisaic in the account of to-be-saved tribes.*
Just coincidentally, though later than the Scrolls, Paul (like Josephus) claimed to be a (Rome-friendly?) Pharisee.
Revelation may be anti-Pauline, given its account of false apostles in (similar-sounding?) Ephesus, where Paul had been.
* in “The Exclusion of Ephraim in Rev. 7: 4-8 and Essene Polemic Against Pharisees”
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Exclusion_of_Ephraim.pdf