A compendium of Signs and Portents

April 29, 2024 11:53 AM

The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.

The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
posted by Rhaomi (15 comments total)

What with our current flooding and plagues of locusts, I am really glad not to find "news" and "topical" in this post's tags.
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The "fiery streaming tails of comets" looks suspiciously like a Christmas card that I have received more than once, though I don't know if it was an homage or outright theft of the artwork.

While the "fleecy clouds" is a bit literal-minded for me, the colors in these illustrations are so great!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:28 PM on April 29

It's hard to imagine ever the original viewers keeping a straight face when they came to the monstrous birth. It has six buttocks!
posted by Paul Slade at 12:41 PM on April 29

Does it have a page for bloody horses running wild through the streets of London?
posted by chavenet at 1:18 PM on April 29 [5 favorites]

Harumph, no mention of Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People.
posted by vverse23 at 1:36 PM on April 29 [6 favorites]

I can't get to the archive.is page -- is there any explanation of the history of the book since Augsberg? All I can find in other articles is that it mysteriously 'reappeared' a few years ago, which my cynical brain translates as 'stolen goods that have been scrubbed through enough owners to be bragged about by the latest one'.
posted by tavella at 1:46 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

outright theft of the artwork

Because somehow you feel this is still under copyright?
posted by hippybear at 2:23 PM on April 29 [3 favorites]

Behold the Augsburg Book of Miracles, a Brilliantly-Illuminated Manuscript of Supernatural Phenomena from Renaissance Germany
I have no idea if the book was stolen, I do diamonds.


The Book of Miracles: Rare Medieval Illustrations of Magical Thinking from
The Margalian

from the Futility Closet: 'The Augsburg Book of Miracles':"The manuscript is something of a prodigy in itself, it must be said,” wrote Marina Warner in the New York Review of Books in 2014."

the link to NYT is the same article in the ,is link but paywalled. the way back machine captured the article but not all the pictures, I know putting .is into the way back machine, yeah.
posted by clavdivs at 2:44 PM on April 29

Thanks for the archive.org link, clavdivs. "silence wraps its discovery", yeah, stolen goods somewhere along the line. If I had to guess, probably during WWII, with the direct owners of it dead but relatives that would have claim on it if they admitted the provenance.
posted by tavella at 3:24 PM on April 29 [1 favorite]

hippybear: "Because somehow you feel this is still under copyright?"

They could mean "theft" as in "heisted from the private collection of the Lord Archduke", which, maybe! It first popped up at a German auction house in 2007, with no provenance before then. Tbh, if this marvel had to be pilfered from some millionaire's secret stash in order for it to become public knowledge, I wouldn't cry about it. (It's actually in the hands of art collector Mickey Cartin rn, so if you're not happy with the quality of the smaller scans, you know where to go!)
posted by Rhaomi at 4:46 PM on April 29 [2 favorites]

German auction house? Yeah, WWII loot seems almost certain. There's no reason to be secretive about the provenance and history, unless there's stuff that would make your possession of it questionable.
posted by tavella at 6:47 PM on April 29

Great stuff. I like the way among all the rains of blood, showers of locusts and ghastly plagues, somebody thought snow in summer was up there too. I mean, we had a picnic planned?
posted by Phanx at 5:23 AM on April 30

It has six buttocks!

bombastic lowercase pronouncements: you had one job
posted by elkevelvet at 9:54 AM on April 30 [1 favorite]

Ohhh... this fills my cup at a very, very deep level.
When I was nine years old my folks took me to the Getty and I got real weird real quick over the "Visions of the Knight Tondel" illuminations from the 15th century.
Being also-weird professor-types, they didn't hesitate to buy me a very lovely bound copy from the museum gift shop.
I read it daily, pouring over the images and reading and re-reading the translation notes. Even learned a little French along the way.

Now I'm a church pastor. I'm going to be digging through this for weeks, thank you so, so much for sharing. I adore this post.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 11:58 AM on April 30 [3 favorites]

I have to admit, the church pastor reveal felt a bit like a plot twist.
posted by hippybear at 3:31 PM on April 30 [2 favorites]

Okay, so... for some reason I'm led to mention the album The Vigil, from Kemper Crabb. It's an exploration of Christian melodies and symbolism in the form of the overnight vigil a night would be making before becoming a knight. Crabb is contemporary christian music adjacent, and this album is actually one I keep coming back to across the decades.

Anyway, might be sometthing people reading this thread would enjoy.
posted by hippybear at 1:57 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]