The sumptuous Munich Golden Psalter was made at the beginning of the thirteenth century for an important female patron from Oxfordshire. It is lavishly decorated, containing 91 full-page miniatures executed in five picture cycles with over three hundred biblical scenes in total. Most scenes in the manuscript are set against glittering, burnished gold backgrounds, making the Psalter a luxury production of the Middle Ages and bestowing it with ‘golden book’ (codex aureus) status.

On folio 13r, a prefatory miniature in the Genesis cycle depicts scenes from the life of Jacob in two registers. Above, Jacob dreams of a ladder between earth and heaven (Genesis 28:10–22), here stretched across a golden sky and climbed on by six angels. Their wings and turning bodies suggest their energetic movement to and fro between earth and heaven—represented by undulating bands of colourful clouds in the upper right corner of the miniature. Their continuous passage forms a link to Jacob on whom favour is being bestowed as he sleeps.

Psalm 85:1 opens with a powerful cry for God’s restoration of his people and revisits the story of Jacob as a reminder of the grace found through divine intercession: in the words of the Psalmist, ‘Thou wast favourable to thy land; thou didst restore the fortunes of Jacob’.

Central to this restoration is God’s mercy towards the sins of humanity as described in the following verses of Psalm 85:2–3. God’s mercy is likewise operative in the later, more perilous, episode in Jacob’s story depicted in the bottom register of this illumination. Here we see him wrestling with an angel (Genesis 32:22–32). The Psalter miniature captures a pinnacle moment in the match: the wrestlers are pressed head-to-head, their eyes are locked, and the angel’s left arm extends around the body of Jacob to wound him at the hip.

Though Jacob and the angel appear entangled in the height of battle, their posture as they tussle also closely resembles an embrace. The wound is not the last word. As if to indicate a truce, the angel makes a gesture of blessing over Jacob with his right hand, and effectively restores him as keeper of his inheritance.

References

Morgan, Nigel. 2011. Der goldene Münchner Psalter = The Munich golden psalter (Luzern: Quaternio Verlag)

Graham, Henry B. 1975. ‘The Munich Psalter’, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art), pp. 301–08

The illuminations in this late medieval Book of Hours, likely made in Paris in the 1470s to accompany prayer at intervals throughout the day, are attributed to the French artist known only as Master François (active c.1459–88). At the opening of Matins in the Hours of the Virgin, a full-page illumination depicts the meetings of the reconciled virtues in a scene allegorized from Psalm 85:10, here following the translation from the Latin Vulgate Psalm 84:11, ‘Mercy and Truth are met together, Justice and Peace have kissed’.

The iconographic features of this allegorical assembly (called the ‘Parliament of Heaven’, and also known in French as the Procès de Paradis or ‘Trial of Paradise’) were influenced by popular medieval Mystery plays that enacted a series of events imagined as taking place just before the Incarnation of Christ.

In the top register, in an arc of heaven filled with angels painted red en camaïeu (a monochrome painting technique), the throne of heaven resembles the iconography of the Trinity on a ‘Mercy Seat’ or in German a Gnadenstuhl. Christ holds the cross, the main instrument of his Passion, beside God the Father. Between them hovers the dove of the Holy Spirit. The open book they jointly hold represents their universal governance and power of judgement.

Directly below, the Archangel Gabriel, with green wings, kneels between two groups of female personifications joined together by their enfolding gestures. Mercy and Truth hold each other’s hands, and Justice and Peace press their faces together in warm familiarity.

In the lower register, and architecturally framed, is the familiar scene of Gabriel’s Annunciation to the Virgin where the archangel appears a second time to fulfil his new mission. Psalm 85, with its themes of revival and restoration, cannot be stressed enough as the affiliate setting of the Annunciation.

Above, a text window bears the Latin incipit (or opening phrase) of another Vulgate Psalm (50:17): ‘O Lord, thou wilt open my lips: and my mouth shall declare thy praise’. It suggestively echoes the Virgin’s words when she speaks to Gabriel, and foretells her subsequent psalm of praise known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55).

References

Claggett Chew, Samuel. 1947. The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographic Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)

In 1884, the Danish-French painter Camille Pissarro purchased a home in Éragny, a quaint village in northern France, which would serve as the setting for several of his paintings over the next decade. It was in Éragny that Pissarro would experiment with the pointillist technique, a novel application of paint that utilized a myriad of small dots of colour to form pictures.

Painted in 1888, Pissarro’s Apple Harvest depicts a sun-dappled field of apple trees and its workers. The scene is executed in hundreds of brushstrokes in a range of rainbow hues. Multiple bands of colour, suggesting furrows in the field, form a sloping horizon marked with several trees along the edge.

In the foreground, four people work under a tall apple tree with a crooked trunk and wide canopy. The tree’s shadow, which Pissarro executed in darker hues, provides a cool place for them to gather the harvest. Two women wearing aprons bend to collect fallen fruit, while another woman looks up at the jostling of tree branches by a man holding a long-handled tool. The harvest is collected in five baskets, most of them filled to the brim with ripe produce.

The closing verses of Psalm 85 are rich in the use of metaphor to describe God’s goodness as a plentiful harvest. Calling to mind Leviticus 26:4 and God’s promise of rain for crops, Psalm 85:12 says, ‘Yea, the Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase’.

Pissarro’s Apple Harvest forms the very picture of fruitful increase yearned for in the words of the Psalmist, and in this case imparted after necessary labour and toil. In the distance, a horse-drawn wagon rolls along, suggesting the final verse of Psalm 85:13, ‘Righteousness will go before him, and make his footsteps a way’. Much like the cyclical nature of agricultural tasks, the Psalm’s end establishes a path that leads ever forward for the virtuous.

References

Karl, Klaus H. 2018. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) (New York: Parkstone Press International)