Dorothea Hofmann

Drôlerien - Caprice

Medieval books are full of surprising illuminations. The sacred, serious text of the Gospels and Psalms is not only lined with abstract patterns or flower tendrils, but angels, people, animals - and above all mythical creatures, which are often all of these at the same time - can be found everywhere. Most of them are engaged in rather peculiar activities: Rabbits play instruments, knights fight with oversized snails, cephalopods and strange body parts populate the parchment. The seemingly exuberant imagination of the painters was not just an ornament, but also helped with memorization, as each page had its very own "face". But didn't this fundamentally change everything: didn't the bizarre world gradually give the pious canonical text new subtexts and strange secondary meanings - and in the end was it still so easy to decide what was the main thing and what was secondary: the text or the pictures? (Dorothea Hofmann)