Longing for God's Face

The Psalter was the fundamental devotional text of the Middle Ages, and more illuminated Psalters survive than any other type of book. For almost all the medieval period, the texts of the psalms, canticles and litany were in Latin—the language of the Church in the Middle Ages. The whole Psalter was recited weekly as part of the Divine Office, an idea which spread from the clergy to the laity, who by the thirteenth century were commissioning grand illuminated Psalters either for their own use, or for their personal chapels. Initials and borders mark the tripartite division of the psalms (at Psalms 1, 51, and 101), or eight-fold division (at Psalms 1, 26, 38, 52, 68, 80, 97, and 109) into blocks of psalms to be recited at Matins and at Sunday Vespers. In an age before page numbering, they served as a visual guide, helping the reader navigate his or her way around the text. Illustrating the Psalter posed a particular challenge for the medieval artist, however. Unlike most of the books of the Old Testament, the Psalms are not narrative but poetry, and not amenable to illustration by stories related in their texts. Different conventions evolved in different regions to address this, with particular scenes associated with particular psalms. Large historiated initials could contain depictions of King David, believed in the Middle Ages to have been the author of the Psalms, or episodes from the life of Christ, who was understood typologically as their subject (the ‘blessed man’ of Psalm 1 was seen as both David, and Christ Incarnate, redeeming humankind from the Fall). The Anointing of David was the conventional English subject for Psalm 26. Certain psalms were thought to have been composed on particular occasions: this psalm’s title associates it with David’s anointing. The artist of the Ormesby Psalter has combined the biblical scene with a more literal response to the words of the psalm. God descends from above bearing a shield, illustrating his defence of the Psalmist described in verse 1, ‘The Lord is my light and my protection, of whom shall I be afraid?’. To the right five mailed knights peer out of a walled city, in response to the third verse: ‘If armies in camp should stand together against me, my heart will not fear’. In the Cuerden Psalter the D of Psalm 26 contains a complex but fundamentally literal response to the opening words of the psalm. A cleric in a white robe hands a lighted taper to King David, who appears to be standing in water. Commentaries frequently interpret Psalm 26 as referring to Christ’s Baptism, which is perhaps alluded to here; or perhaps the artist is making a punning reference to the words immediately below the initial, ‘aquo trepidabo’. Correctly understood as ‘of whom shall I be afraid’, the compression of the Latin wording might have reminded the perhaps less than completely fluent medieval viewer of the Latin word for water, ‘aqua’. A different tradition is exemplified in the little Mosan Psalter (Morgan M.155). We do not know precisely for whom this little book was made, though it was presumably a woman of the des Pres family of Colonster, near Liege—their arms appear on folio 75. Psalters produced in Liege form a distinctive iconographic group, with New Testament scenes in their initials. The choice of these scenes derives from scholarly exegesis on the text of the psalms which interpreted them in a christological sense, and illustrated the Old Testament text with New Testament examples. Typological imagery was immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, and explanations of particular themes can often be found in the commentaries on the Psalms by Early Christian Fathers. We should not, however, assume that the artists painting the initials in Liege Psalters, or the lay men and women using them, were personally familiar with the commentaries of Jerome, Augustine, or Bede, any more than they necessarily understood every word of the Latin psalms they were accustomed to reciting. The ideas common to many earlier medieval commentators were repeated in contemporary works, and presumably patrons had such ideas explained to them by their own spiritual advisers. Each of these illuminations is a response to the psalm’s own request for illumination: the Psalmist’s longing, read in Christian terms, to look on God’s face (v.8) and be shown God’s path (v.11).