Abstract

Writing in gold has almost completely escaped the attention of art historical manuscript studies. Whereas the semantics and the materiality of gold used in works of goldsmithery as well as in illuminations and panel paintings have been frequently discussed, the fact that gold has been also applied to embellish texts, be they single initials and titles or entire chapters and volumes, has drawn relatively sparse comment. This article is part of a larger research project on Western chrysography. Its scope is to investigate the specific reasons for the use of gold as writing material in the Western Middle Ages. This implies a critical re-evaluation of the standard explanations of the phenomenon in previous research. To approach the issue, it is fruitful to look at single manuscripts and analyse their specific places and ways of application of chrysography. One case that plays a prominent role in this paper is the Golden Psalter from St Gall: an illuminated manuscript that was begun at the court of Charles the Bald and later completed at the monastery of St Gall. In studying this and other examples, the particular and somehow contradictory colour and light effects of chrysography will be emphasized. On the one hand, gold script has the potential to attract visual attention at a long range, especially under the artificial illumination of candlelight; and, on the other, pages with gold script resist a fast, transparent reading of written notation. They draw the reader’s attention to the forms and arrangement of the letters, to the weave of the lines, to the oscillation between emphasis and fade-out on the page, and to reflections that dissociate the graphemes from their material carrier, provoking an optical state of suspense. In short, writing in gold constitutes a specific model of ‘Schriftbildlichkeit’ or ‘Iconographia’, defying the disappearance of the single graphemes behind the text which for a long time has been considered the most characteristic feature of writing.

摘要

金字书写几乎完全逃脱了艺术史手稿研究的关注。鉴于黄金在金匠作品以及插图和壁画中使用的语义和物质性经常被讨论，黄金也被应用于装饰文本，无论是单个首字母和标题，还是整章和整卷，引起了相对稀疏的评论。这篇文章是一个更大的西方书写学研究项目的一部分。其范围是调查西方中世纪使用黄金作为书写材料的具体原因。这意味着对先前研究中对该现象的标准解释进行批判性的重新评估。要解决这个问题，查看单个手稿并分析它们的特定位置和应用chrysography的方法是富有成果的。在本文中发挥重要作用的一个案例是圣加尔的金色诗篇：一份彩绘手稿，开始于秃头查理的宫廷，后来在圣加尔修道院完成。在研究这个例子和其他例子时，将强调 chrysography 的特殊和某种程度上矛盾的颜色和光线效果。一方面，金字具有远距离吸引视觉注意力的潜力，尤其是在烛光的人工照明下；另一方面，带有金色字体的页面阻碍了对书面符号的快速、透明的阅读。它们将读者的注意力吸引到字母的形式和排列、线条的编织上，到页面上强调和淡出之间的振荡，以及将字形与其材料载体分离的反射，引发悬念的光学状态。简而言之，金字书写构成了“Schriftbildlichkeit ' 或 ' Iconographia '，无视文字背后单一字形的消失，长期以来一直被认为是书写的最具特色的特征。