While the royal portal was being built and the three large windows of the western façade were being created, the cathedral – or the abbey of St Père en Vallée, in the lower town – also produced several manuscripts whose decoration is on a par with sculpture and glass art: an artistic summit.
One of these treasures, whose Chartres origin has been identified by François Avril, one of the world’s leading specialists, is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where it bears the number 55 of the Latin manuscripts. It is clearly the first part of a Bible, with Latin manuscript 116 forming the second part. It can be dated between 1150 and 1170.
The ornate letters use a variety of motifs, the most common of which are the scroll and the dragon, combined with a virtuoso imagination – it’s never quite clear which is animal and which is vegetable. Leaves of various shapes add to the profusion. Little naked men cling to the stems and walk through them. Some of the letters also feature biblical characters, in keeping with the text.
The colors used are fairly minimal: blue, green, flesh and red. The backgrounds on which they stand out are often gilded.
Here is a selection of the most beautiful letters:
It is interesting to compare these decorations with those of the royal portal. The exuberantly decorated colonnettes behind the splayed statues spring to mind. The resemblance is uncanny, as long as you use your imagination to recreate the original polychromy.
