Giant Mainz Bible
The Mainz Giant Bible (bibliographic: Biblia Latina , English: Giant Bible of Mainz ) is one of the last great Latin Bible manuscripts of the late Middle Ages . It was created at the same time as the invention of printing with movable type by Johannes Gutenberg and was a showpiece of the ducal library in Gotha from the 17th century to 1945 . Today it is in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC
construction
The giant Bible consists of two volumes with a total of 459 parchment pages , each measuring approx. 55 × 40 cm. The manuscript has its original, undecorated full pigskin binding; the book block is held together by a spine with nine frets and a headband made of red, white and green silk.
The pages have a preliminary drawing in faded brown ink that gave the scribe a grid. The text block consists of two columns of 60 lines per page. The letters used are considered typical of 15th century manuscripts in the Rhine area. The writer used two blacks in his ink, and chapter headings and paragraphs were alternately with red and blue ink rubricated . The scribe noted the beginning and the end of his work on the books of the Bible. He started on April 4, 1452 and completed his project after fifteen months on July 9, 1453.
The richly decorated initials and marginal illustrations of this Bible are remarkable . The latter in particular, which can be found particularly splendidly on five pages of the first volume and there show a multitude of plant and animal elements, suggest Mainz as the place of origin of the Bible. It has also been suggested that it served as a model for the book design of the Gutenberg Bible . Würzburg has also been discussed as a place of manufacture.
Provenance
The first recorded owner of the Bible was the Mainz canon Heinrich von Stockheim. During the Thirty Years' War it was part of the Mainz war booty of King Gustav Adolf , who gave it to his general, Duke Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar . After his death in 1639 it was inherited in the ducal library at Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha . After the judicial revocation of the expropriation of the princes in 1928 , it and the entire library were transferred to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and the Gotha Foundation for Science and Art . At the beginning of July 1945 it was brought to Coburg by members of the ducal family along with other top pieces from the ducal collections such as the Echternach Gospels and auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1950 . The American bibliophile Lessing J. Rosenwald acquired it through the bookseller HP Kraus and gave the Bible to the Library of Congress on April 4, 1952 - to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the book.
literature
- Dorothy Miner: The Giant Bible of Mainz: 500th anniversary, April fourth, Fourteen Fifty-two / April fourth, Nineteen Fifty-Two. Library of Congress, [Washington, DC] [o. J.]
- Elgin Vaassen: The workshop of the Giant Mainz Bible in Würzburg and its surroundings. In: Archives for the history of the book industry . Volume 13, 1973, columns 1121-1428.
Web links
- Description at the Library of Congress
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anke Dörrzapf: Your Highness had them packed up . In: Art. The art magazine . July 2003 ( yumpu.com ).
- ↑ http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4504195/