I work at the V&A and walk every day through galleries packed with marvellous things, but the other day I was stopped in my tracks by something unique: eight contemporary illuminated manuscript pages, flecked with gold and shimmering with light and colour in their display cases. They are, I discovered, from the Saint John’s Bible, a project of visionary scope and ambition described by the manuscript expert Christopher de Hamel as ‘either utter madness or magnificent good fortune’: a handwritten and illuminated Bible for the 21st century, the first to be made since the invention of printing more than five centuries ago.
The four openings on display, from the Book of Prophets (three from Ezekiel, one from Isaiah), surprise because they feel absolutely of the moment: their idiom is modern, even if their technique draws on the past. No one could fail to be seduced by their richness of texture and wealth of allusion. The text is handwritten by one of six scribes, using 100-year-old Chinese inks on vellum, in a beautiful, measured script devised and refined specially for this project. And the imagery, which flows organically, almost playfully, around the columns of text, is ageless: some of it resolutely contemporary; some drawing heavily on the archetypes of the past and of other cultures and faiths. The Valley of the Dry Bones in Ezekiel features great mounds of skulls and bones and the wreck of a car in a nightmare landscape of broken glass and twisted metal (reminiscent of 9/11), beneath a rainbow sky filled with schematic Hebrew menorah. The ghostly pall of smoke that attends and partly obscures Isaiah’s Vision of the Lord ‘sitting on a throne with seraphs in attendance, the hem of his robe filling the temple…’ is rent with the seraphs’ words ‘Sanctus, Sanctus’, etched in 24-carat gold.
Around the walls are panels describing how the great folios of calfskin vellum are painstakingly prepared, how the text is mapped by computer on to the page before the scribes begin their work, how the goose and swan feathers are cured and cut for quills, how the powder and leaf gold is applied and burnished, and the way the imagery is devised and built up from layers of different ideas before the paints and pigments are mixed and applied to the page.
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