The Fabric Pieces
Encountering the Beatus Facundus
Easter 2016, I was watching the 1986 film version of ‘The Name of the Rose’ on my laptop. I had read the book by Umberto Eco many years before and loved it. There is a scene in the film where the protagonists, Franciscan Friar William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice are in the Aedificium of an abbey late at night. Within this structure is housed a labyrinthine library which is central to their investigations. It is a character onto itself really and speaks to all kinds of mysteries both spiritual and physical.
In the scene as I recall it, Friar William, played by Sean Connery, stands at a table which is strewn with manuscripts and is astonished at the rarity and beauty of the books hidden in this mysterious library. As he opens individual volumes the camera allows a glimpse of the contents. He opens a page of one of the manuscripts, speaks its name and turns the page. I can remember experiencing a jolt of excitement on seeing a red and black serpent glowing in the candlelight. In that instant, that small cluster of pixels caused such an inexplicable and unexpected reaction in me that it was all I could think of. The movie, the plot, seemed irrelevant. It was as if those pixels just burst into visibility, glowing in mid-air before me, demanding my attention. I had to pause and rewind numerous times to catch the words the actor spoke as he said the name of the manuscript. I eventually deciphered that he said “Beatus Facundus.”
Knowing that Umberto Eco was a most erudite medievalist, I was certain this manuscript existed and I instantly searched for more details. I was delighted to discover excellent reproductions of the illustrations at https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-beatus-of-facundus-1047 . It amazed me that what I had glimpsed as a few pixels, in a movie adapted from a novel, was a digital fragment of a facsimile of an 11th century copy of an illustrated commentary on the Book of Revelation (also called the Apocalypse of John from the New Testament and written sometime between A.D. 81-96); the original illuminated manuscript having been created in the 8th century in a monastery in the mountains of northern Spain by monk and theologian Beatus of Liébana (730–785). The image that had caught my eye in the movie was from the version known as the Beatus de Facundus (or Beatus de León), dating to 1047 and painted by a man called Facundus for Ferdinand I and Queen Sancha. It is composed of 312 leaves and 98 miniatures. Its dimensions were 267 x 361 mm and is held at the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
Looking at the wonderful quality of the reproductions online I decided to make fabric applique and embroidered versions of some of the pages for myself. Although I claim neither great skill nor expertise in either. It just seemed an obvious and a simple way, through a hands-on making, for me to get to know the images and absorb some of the energy I sensed in them. Over the course of the following months I worked on my little craft project and made nine fabric appliques of the pages that most delighted me and maybe will complete more at some point in the future. In the process of cutting and sewing which involved much simplification, I came to know the images well.
I never really attempted to rationalise them as symbols. I intuitively responded to the patterns, the style, the colours, the design, and the symbology but essentially it was the exuberance of the energy that I loved. As I sat sewing, I would occasionally think of the medieval scribes and illuminators who lived once and sat drawing, centuries apart but connected. In hindsight sewing was a good choice. There is a mechanical aspect to sewing that allows the mind free to roam. And though I wondered about the symbols; why the bands of colour? why did the angels seem to hold magnets? what does the seven headed serpent represent? I could live with the multi-valent and multi-dimensional aspects of the symbols articulated in the Beatus and so I mentally let them breathe by not attaching specific meaning. I agree with Jung and Deleuze on that score and take a non-reductionist approach to symbols and their interpretation, not wanting “to limit their analogical play.” In any event I had lost interest in how biblical exegesis or the iconography of Christian art were usually applied, like grids or search engines with pre-set filters. It seems to have invariably led to the distortion of something more vital and often locked in a meaning that confirmed the interpreter’s beliefs and intentions. Eco said as much when he wrote that the textual explanations or commentaries usually involved such a level of entanglement of philosophical, theological and allegorical interpretation, all pointing to the same isotopy, that they fettered rather than freed the enigmatic nature of the vision. I am with Eco when he said that the Book of Revelation “defies a univocal reading.” (p252)
As I mentioned, the original manuscript was written around the year 776 by a monk named Beatus de Liebana and consisted of a Commentary on the Book of Revelation with full page illustrations. Subsequent copies were commissioned over the following centuries (between the 10th century and the 13th century), twenty-three of which survived and are known as the Beatus Codices and comprise of over fifteen hundred individual illuminations. Spanish book art of the medieval period has a distinctive look derived from the hybridization of Islamic art, due to the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century with the resulting influence of Arab culture and the native West Gothic Christian aesthetic. This led to the distinctive Mozarabic style evident in the Beati which has Syrian, Mesopotamian, Persian, Moorish and Christian elements. It has been argued that there is also a definite Coptic influence as well as parallels with Ethiopian manuscripts and painted art. Eco wrote that it is extraordinary how successfully Beatus influenced generation after generation of readers and spawned a plethora of illuminated manuscripts. “To speak of Beatus is in fact to speak also and above all of the Mozarabic miniatures that illustrate all the so-called Beati produced between the tenth and eleventh centuries, in an amazing spate of fabulously beautiful books” (p252) This is the phenomenal thing about the Beatus Codices which occupy a singular place in the history of medieval illumination.
In his book “The Tree and the Labyrinth”, Umberto Eco wrote about the monk who penned the original commentary. The chapter is called “Jottings on Beatus of Liébana.” He wasn’t greatly impressed by the commentary on the Book of Revelation however and though conceding that Beatus, worked under pressure in “Christian Spain entrenched in its isolation at the edges of a hostile world of infidels”; he says he was “a farrago- prone epigone whose Latin syntax would make anyone’s hair stand on end”; that being the least of his criticism. I didn’t feel I was missing much in not reading it. The Commentary Beatus wrote was a claim to decode every image in the Book of Revelation, as Eco says to the point of “exegetical exhaustiveness” (p256). Eco recognised the power of the art as being of a different order:
“what we have is the paradox of a text written in the spirit of Western clarity that will act
as the inspiration for a series of exercises in Mozarabic art, typical instead of an imagination
profoundly permeated with Oriental suggestions. The text can come to grips with the spirit
of Oriental prophecy only by establishing every image as a precise cipher that can be
translated and adapted to exhortatory ends, while the illustrations themselves are
vibrant with expressionistic tensions, straining and contorting themselves to communicate
something else, something more (Camón Aznar 1960: 24).” (Pg255) The Tree and the Labrinth
The Commentary and the artwork which make up the Beatus are obviously two different modes of expression and structure information differently. Attracted to the visual as I was, the symbols illustrated in the Beatus seemed to me to be “psychologically more athletic than words” and the vibration and intimation of something more and other than themselves I think still resonates powerfully and seems to tune the conscious mind in to some strange channel, not so obviously earth-tuned anyway. That is their strength, their energetic charge. Images structure communication within the psyche in unique ways if left to themselves. I was happy to let them percolate and so while sewing I pondered the strangeness of the imagery, the evident numerology and listened to and read my books (particularly
of the works of Jane Roberts) in an effort to understand in my own way.
