In my last post, “Aftermath,” I described the before-and-after experience of a recent trip to Los Angeles to pitch a drama series for television. Among other instances of what felt like divine timing at the start of the trip despite the dispiriting outcome by the end of it, there was one such instance that could not be denied: I happened to be in L.A. for the opening of an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum titled, “In the Beginning Was the Word: Medieval Gospel Illumination.”
For that rare breed of devotee to calligraphy there is no place like the Getty Center to refresh one’s soul (thanks to same passion on the part of the oil magnate whose name it bears). All the more so when you’re in town doing your best not to sell it while trying to sell this or that project.
Whatever else would come of my efforts in Hollywood, I knew that high up on a hill off the 405, above the traffic, smog, and general stench of desperation that lingers over Los Angeles on even the clearest of days (or perhaps most especially on the clearest of days), there was sanctuary to be had when my schedule allowed halfway through the trip.
And, oh, the sanctuary indeed, when one steps inside from the sun-soaked and blinding travertine courtyards of the Getty to enter the darkened manuscript pavilion whose light and temperature are both kept low for the sake of preservation.
You can probably tell this wasn’t the first time I’ve made such a mid-week retreat.
This time the subject was the sacred tradition of Gospel illumination in medieval Christian art and worship, with manuscripts on view whose provenance ranged from Western Europe to Byzantium, Armenia, and Ethiopia between the ninth and seventeenth centuries.
Despite the expanse of history and geography on display in the small exhibit, one of its most outstanding features is the relative degree of artistic uniformity across cultural divides—a main factor in the missionary success of early Christianity.
Hence common elements across time and place: from decorated canon tables to portraits of the Four Evangelists, from illuminated initials to illustrations of the life of Christ.
Parchment for the durability, gold for the glory.
But such elemental uniformity by no means connotes any kind of homogeneity, as “distinct regional inflections and the visual cultures that produced them” (to quote the press release) so vividly attest: the inflated and red-skinned Evangelist of mythic proportions in an Ethiopian frontispiece strikes an equally reverent but far different note than his more ascetic-looking counterpart in a Byzantine rendition; the monochromatic rigidity of the lettering (apart from its illuminated initial) in an English antiphonal is no less breathtaking than the wildly vibrant lettering of an Armenian Gospel book.
Given the largely illiterate world in which faith most often truly came by hearing thanks to public reading from the texts of this tradition, books assumed a sacred function among the other primary furnishings of a church’s altar.
And as I walked through the exhibit, I couldn’t help but wonder the fairly obvious: what will become of good old-fashioned books, whether dog-eared paperbacks or leatherbound scriptures, in our increasingly digitized age of Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and the like?
All you devotees of this brand new tradition, fear not; I’m not about to make the foregone disquisition of a progress-phobic Luddite.
In fact, upon the death last week of Steve Jobs, the man responsible for my means to compose and deliver this piece in electronic form, I was reminded afresh of his own unlikely debt to the calligraphic tradition in designing the now ubiquitous Macintosh computer fonts. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University (read or see it here), Jobs told the story of this debt, and it’s worth quoting in full:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
His personal jibe at Windows aside, Jobs’ point stands, and undoubtedly will stand the test of time. But the story is most fascinating for its incidental factor: one of the most forward-thinking figures of the modern era happened to look back at a once-hallowed tradition from a bygone era, and here we are.
I hope that somewhere along the way Jobs had the minor epiphany, as I have, in simply realizing that the word “digital” has its root in the Latin “digitus,” meaning “finger, toe.” But if he didn’t consciously, he sure did unconsciously.
Given that the recent completion of The St. John’s Bible, a seven-volume and twelve-year project created entirely by hand by the British calligrapher, Donald Jackson, and his team of scribes and illuminators, happens to coincide with the publication by Crossway of Four Holy Gospels, for which the contemporary painter, Makoto Fujimura, provided the abstract frontispieces and initials, perhaps the illuminated tradition is seeing a revival.
Perhaps there’s something of a truly digital resurrection afoot….