Bifolia with Scenes from the Life of Christ (1230–1240): Art, History and Details

Bifolia with Scenes from the Life of Christ (1230–1240) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A sheet of vellum (animal skin) folded down the center to create two leaves, or folios, is called a bifolium (plural: bifolia). This pair of bifolia originally were to have been inserted one inside the other, forming part of a large psalter, or book of the psalms. The small paintings, called miniatures, decorating each leaf are subdivided into four small panels and illustrate the life of Christ. This particular format, along with the style of decoration, tells us that the psalter was made in North Germany, in the Diocese of Hildesheim. In northern Europe, after 1050, a tradition emerged of illustrating psalters with scenes of the life of David (the author of the Psalms) and the life of Christ. This juxtaposition implied a shared ancestry, since Christ was a descendant of the House of David. In the parent volume these miniatures may have been accompanied by a David cycle.

Object facts

• Title: Bifolia with Scenes from the Life of Christ
• Date: 1230–1240
• Culture: Germany, Lower Saxony (Diocese of Hildesheim), Braunschweig(?), 13th century
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.7 x 31 cm (12 1/16 x 12 3/16 in.); Framed: 48.3 x 63.5 cm (19 x 25 in.); Overall: 30.7 x 45.2 cm (12 1/16 x 17 13/16 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 55.9 cm (16 x 22 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1933.448.1

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Holger A. Klein. Sacred Gifts and Worldly Treasures: Medieval Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2007.
• Couzin, Robert. Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art. Boston: Brill, 2021.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.