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:

This pair of bifolia consists of two sheets of vellum each folded in half to create four leaves. In the bound volume, they would have originally been inserted one inside the other to form part of a large psalter or book of the psalms. The miniatures decorating each leaf are subdivided into four small panels and sequentially illustrate the life of Christ. This particular format, along with aspects of style, help us locate the psalter’s place of production to North Germany and the Diocese of Hildesheim. In northern Europe, after 1050, a tradition emerged of illustrating psalters with miniature cycles of the life of David (the author of the Psalms) and the life of Christ. This juxtaposition implied the connection of lineage, since Christ was the descendant of the House of David. It is possible that in the parent volume these miniatures were 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: 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

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.
• Hlavackova, Hana. "Liber viaticus Jana ze Stredy-ikonografie." In Liber viaticus Jana ze Středy. 119-167. Praha: Academia: Národní muzeum, 2016.

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.