Katrin Kogman-Appel

The three-way relationship between patrons, artists, and viewers poses some crucial methodological questions that have been considered repeatedly and intensely in the recent art-historical discourse on illuminated manuscripts. If we are to decipher meanings or explicit messages of images correctly, we ought to attend first to the question of who would have determined these meanings and messages and who would have designed the overall appearance of the images and their specific features. An artistic mind aware of the full potential of the impact the visual has on any given viewer’s perception, perhaps? Or a patron with a particular theological or political agenda? To whom would such messages have been addressed? Would the potential addressees only have been erudite viewers or might they have been uneducated individuals as well? Art can function as an active message bearer on the one hand or as a more passive reflector of social and cultural circumstances on the other. This paper discusses several test cases and views them in the light of recent methodological considerations in the field. It revisits a few themes that I have discussed on various occasions in the past and attempts to put them into a methodological framework that centers around two core issues: first, the three-way relationship between the patron, the artist (or rather, the illuminator), and the viewer; and second, the hierarchy of the textual and the visual when it comes to integrating works of art in the complex fabric of cultural and social life.

In 1233 a certain R. Joseph bar Moses of Würzburg commissioned an illuminated copy of Rashi's Bible commentary, now in Munich. After the text was finished, the task of illuminating was put into the hands of a Christian painter, apparently a man named Heinrich, who kept a lay workshop in Würzburg . Three years later a giant Bible, now in Milan, was commissioned perhaps by the same patron, but not necessarily in the same city . It, too, was illuminated; this time, however, it cannot be excluded that the paintings were made by Jewish artists. Both manuscripts are richly decorated with narrative scenes involving human figures. In the following decades it became more and more customary for wealthy Jews of Germany and northern France to have their Bibles, prayer books, and other texts adorned with figural miniatures. Yet there is no evidence that during the Middle Ages human figures were painted in any form in a Jewish context before the 1230s. A few textual references from the twelfth century indicate wall paintings and stained-glass windows in synagogues with images of animals and dragons, but none have survived. Some decades after the first illuminated books made their appearance, the most outstanding authority on religious law of his time, R. Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg , was asked his opinion of this phenomenon. R. Meir was worried, as his reply shows, but not for reasons of religious law; his concern was that images in painted books would distract believers from their pious concentration during prayer