Exhibition of the week Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (01223-332900, www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk). Until 30 December

Most medieval art is now lost, said Florence Hallett on Theartsdesk. com. Whether through war, floods, fire, vandalism or botched restoration efforts, all but a fraction of pre-Renaissance creative endeavour has “succumbed to the ravages of time”. Nowadays, illuminated manuscripts are the best preserved legacy of visual art in medieval times; unlike so much else, the “richly decorated” pages of many such devotional texts have survived intact. Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum holds one of the world’s finest collections of illuminated manuscripts, and to mark its bicentenary, it is hosting an exhibition of 150 examples created between the sixth and 16th centuries. The “beguiling” books on show in The Fitzwilliam’s darkened galleries “twinkle convincingly” – just as they would have done by candlelight in the Middle Ages. This is a “rare and wonderful” opportunity to see these “exquisite treasures”.

The monks who created the first illuminated manuscripts aimed to “glorify God” and “pass down the written word”, said Jonathan Mcaloon in The Daily Telegraph. But as the form developed, a professional class of illuminator arose. The exhibition traces this history, showing how the Byzantine-influenced style of the tenth century developed into the “softer, more sinuous” forms of the 12th. By the late 14th century, the art “reached an apex”, as evidenced by an encyclopaedia depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Its text is “shot through with gold”, its margins an “explosion of spiky ivy”. Elsewhere, an unfinished 14th century pontifical is a “masterclass of gold work” with a “strangely modern” composition. The show “blows apart clichés” about the medieval world, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian – particularly that it was “drab” and that its art was “impersonal and generic”. The Middle Ages brought to life in these books was “saturated with colour”, full of “agony and ecstasy”. A “startling” depiction of a nude, bluegreen man serves to illustrate melancholy, while a “spectacular” scroll from the reign of Henry VIII explains the “science” of alchemy, looking for all the world “like a prop from a Harry Potter film”. You only need look at a 13th century English book of psalms depicting a “moving” image of Christ on the cross to see that this is “expressionist art, as full of emotion as a work by van Gogh”.