ABSTRACT
This chapter looks briefly at some hitherto neglected difficulties affecting the understanding of the Bury Bible. It considers the choice of subject matter and an aspect of the construction of the pictorial compositions. The chapter explores that the artist seems to have imposed his own ethos on the representation of the narratives both as regards their emotional content and the invention of the iconography. The Bury Bible is an interesting case study because, as is well known, many of the illuminations, including all the large ones, are painted not on to the vellum sheets which carry the writing but on to double thicknesses of membrane, an extra layer of skin being pasted on to the page. The bulk of the display capitals are executed by a skilled writer working with pigments visually indistinguishable from Master Hugo’s. The illumination of the Bury Bible shows an evenness of surface and opacity which is hard to parallel in earlier Romanesque art.
