Citadelle Art Museum in Canadian opens new exhibit on 'Illuminated Manuscripts'

Submitted to the Globe-News
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CANADIAN — The Citadelle Art Museum is pleased to present "Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th-18th Centuries," which includes more than 35 works — some with elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament — from medieval Bibles, Prayer Books, Psalters, Books of Hours, Choir Books, Missals, Breviaries, and Lectionaries drawn from the collection of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, who organized the exhibition.

Examples of the materials — parchment, vellum, gold leaf, and minerals which were ground into pigments — used by artists before the age of printed books to create these extraordinary pages are also featured in the exhibit. The exhibition opened June 13 and will be on view through Nov. 18, on loan from the Reading Public Art Museum. This collection has never been exhibited west of the Mississippi River.

The Citadelle Art Museum in Canadian recently opened a new exhibit, "Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th-18th Centuries," on view through November.
The Citadelle Art Museum in Canadian recently opened a new exhibit, "Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th-18th Centuries," on view through November.

Highlights include a lavish Bifolio from a Book of Hours with illuminations by Joachinus de Gigantibus de Rotenberg (German, active 1440s – 1490s), a Perugian Leaf from a Dominican Missal from the late fourteenth century, a large Bifolio of a Spanish Choir Book from the fifteenth century, a Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther from the eighteenth century, and a leather-bound Italian Gradual containing the chants for the mass penned in the 1720s.

Most of the works date from the 13th through the 18th centuries and are created with ink on parchment or vellum (animal skin). French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, and German examples will be included in the exhibition. Additionally, non-western sheets, including a sumptuous seventeenth-century leaf from the Koran and Shahnameh (the illustrated Persian Book of Kings) pages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all of the sheets came to the Reading Public Museum through Otto Ege, a well-known Cleveland-area bookseller, and specialist who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for 65 and older, and free for children 18 and younger. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information or to plan your trip, visit www.thecitadelle.org or call (806) 323-8899.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Citadelle museum in Canadian opens 'Illuminated Manuscripts' exhibit