Miniature from a Latin Bible: Saint Luke (c. 1100): Art, History and Details

Miniature from a Latin Bible: Saint Luke (c. 1100) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Inspired by Byzantine painting, this rare miniature represents the last surviving fragment of a once magnificent bible. The fundamental text of every medieval monastery was the Latin Bible. Monastic bibles at this time were usually large, cumbersome books (commonly in two or three volumes) designed to be recited from a lectern-rather than for private study. This exquisite miniature was excised from such a bible and introduces the beginning of the Gospel of St. Luke. Undoubtedly copied and painted in the scriptorium at Cluny, the bible may have been influenced by a manuscript carried to Cluny from Byzantium, or else may represent the work of an Italian artist working at Cluny but acquainted with Byzantine modes of painting. A large monastery such as Cluny probably had up to a dozen copyists continuously producing such manuscripts. A surviving 12th-century booklist records that Cluny possessed some 570 volumes, a large number for the time.

Object facts

• Title: Miniature from a Latin Bible: Saint Luke
• Date: c. 1100
• Culture: France, Burgundy, Abbey of Cluny
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, tempera, and gold on vellum
• Dimensions: Sheet: 17.3 x 16.1 cm (6 13/16 x 6 5/16 in.); Framed: 44.5 x 34.3 cm (17 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.); Matted: 40.6 x 30.5 cm (16 x 12 in.)
• Collection: MED - Manuscript Illuminations
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1968.190

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wixom, William D. Treasures from Medieval France. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• Wixom, William D. “A Manuscript Painting from Cluny.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 56, no. 4 (1969): 131–35.

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.