Anonymous southern German artist

Anonymous southern German artist
Job, historiated initial 'U' on a leaf from a glossed Book of Job, decorated manuscript on vellum [southern Germany, second third 12th century]
A beautiful example of Romanesque script and decoration, the text an extremely early witness to the Glossa of Anselm of Laon.

187 x 143mm. The historiated initial 'U' formed by the standing figure of Job holding a scroll with Job 19:23: 'Quis michi tribuat ut scribantur sermones mei', 'Oh that my words were now written!', and a leviathan-dragon biting Job's ankle, opening the Book of Job 'Uir erat in terra Hus nomine Iob', principal text in a single column of 10 lines written in a clear, upright Romanesque hand in black ink surrounded by marginal and interlinear glosses in a smaller, more rounded Romanesque bookscript in brown ink, the verso with two columns of 45 and 43 visible lines of text (margins cropped, affecting text, a few small holes, a little darkened and stained).

Text, layout and decoration: The glosses largely agree with those attributed to Anselm of Laon (died c.1117), but are evidently an early instantiation influenced by commentaries circulating in southern Germany at the time, and include references to Gregory's Moralia in Iob and St Jerome. Anselm was a French theologian, dean and chancellor of the Cathedral at Laon, and one the principal pioneers of biblical hermeneutics. His greatest work, the Glossa ordinaria, an interlinear and marginal gloss on the Scriptures, was one of the great intellectual achievements of the Middle Ages, one of the first efforts to present discrete patristic and earlier medieval interpretations of individual verses of Scripture in a readily accessible, easily referenced way. The same unusual layout of text and gloss can be found in the Rebdorf Psalter, also with glosses from Anselm of Laon (ex-Schøyen MS 712 and Idda Collection) and belonging to the Augustinian house of St John the Baptist at Rebdorf, near Eichstätt, in Bavaria, and other glossed Bible manuscripts from Rebdorf, now in the Vatican Library, MSS Pal. Lat. 51, 91, 98 and 121. The script of our fragment is particularly close to that of Pal. Lat. 91, a glossed Pauline Epistles. The historiated initial depicting Job, painted in subtle, pale washes of green, red and grey, is a striking example of German Romanesque manuscript painting.