viz.

Image Credit: The Library of Congress

Eric Gill’s illustrated 1931 The Four Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ According to the Authorized Version of King James I may be the most beautiful text in the Harry Ransom Center’s King James Bible exhibition.  Gill, who was a graphic designer, a sculptor, and a firm Catholic, melded his minimalist design aesthetics with Catholic art’s gilded tradition to make what the Library of Congress calls “a modern homage to the tradition of illuminated text.”  Gill’s black and white figures, however, dance around the elegant typeface to create a Catholicism aesthetically rebranded for the twentieth century: sparse but still striking.

(Slightly NSFW after the break.)

Image Credit: Posters 555

All those who wander are not lost—in fact, wandering is sometimes the point. I did a little of this while touring the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit on The King James Bible: Its History and Influences. I particularly enjoyed examining the numerous visuals on display: exquisite Jacob Lawrence and William Blake illustrations, colorful posters for The Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, and patterns for Robert DeNiro’s Biblical tattoos in Cape Fear. 

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center

Eric Gill’s Calf is currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center as part of their new exhibition The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The calf first appears in the King James Bible in the following verses. “Make us gods, which shall go before us... And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me...And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:1-4). In both the statue and in this chapter of Exodus we can begin to consider the relationship between these humans and gods and animals.

Two weeks ago I posted on the title page of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible. This week, I thought it’d be fun to consider the first page of the New Testament in that same edition. [Click here for a large-sized image of the page.] This first page of the New Testament contains as much imagery as the edition’s actual title page, which is surprising given that it comes nearly 4/5’s of the way through the book. And though I am no expert in seventeenth-century bibliography, it does seem a little bit odd that such a detailed woodcut would come in the middle of a book, but perhaps this was commonplace for bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In any event, there’s a lot going on in this image, and I thought you might find it enjoyable to take a moment this week and consider the page.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As I was perusing the new Harry Ransom Center exhibit, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, I couldn’t help but linger over the first edition’s title page. The image is gorgeous and what one would expect from King James I’s own printer, Robert Baker. It features Moses and Aaron flanking the title, with the four Evangelists around the corners. Above them, the remaining Apostles are depicted, each holding the various symbols that are associated with their individual iconographies. Of these figures, the one that caught my eye was St. Andrew. Prominently on top of the title page, St. Andrew’s saltire is much larger than any of the other objects that the various figures are holding. To a certain extent, its largeness is obvious and expected given that it’s a slightly rotated crucifix. But one can’t but help also thinking about why St. Andrew might have been given special primacy here. After all, this was a Bible commissioned by King James.