Fantastical miniature creatures, visual illusion and virtuoso calligraphy combine in the sixteenth century Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta! Dr. Orton investigates this intricately illuminated manuscript from the magic-obsessed court of Rudolf II.
The Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta began its life in 1561-62 in Vienna as a book of historical alphabets and calligraphic displays. It was created by Georg Bocskay for Emperor Ferdinand I. Then, between 1591-1596, the manuscript was transformed.
Ferdinand’s grandson, Rudolf II, moved the court to Prague and commissioned Joris Hoefnagel to illuminate the manuscript. The result was a mysterious dialogue between ostentatious calligraphy and visual illusion.
Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
The court of Rudolf II was obsessed with magic. The Emperor’s collection of magical artifacts for his “cabinet of curiosities” was a symbol of Rudolf’s control over the world. Rudolf also spent a great deal of money patronising the occult sciences. As Matthew D. Lincoln points out, this gave Rudolf “the appearance of both wisdom as well as power.”
One of Rudolf’s associations was Rabbi Judah Loew. Loew was the Supreme Chief Rabbi of Bohemia and he is associated with the Golem of Prague, a legendary creature made of mud who was created to protect Jewish people from the persecution they were facing. The mud figure was brought to life by inserting into its mouth the shem, a Hebrew word, inscribed onto parchment.
Rudolf’s court was divided by two opposing magical schools of thought. The Cabbalist tradition was a kind of Jewish mysticism transmitted through sacred texts. The power of words is a big part of this tradition, as seen in the use of the shem in the Golem story. This certainly had an influence on Rudolf: he studied Hebrew extensively and had his horoscope illustrated by Hoefnagel. On the other side, Paracelsians thought that secret knowledge of the world comes from the study of nature, not from books and the written word. As Lee Hendrix points out, Paracelsus thought that nature was the archetypal text and human words were a flawed imitation.
The Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta is not explicitly a magical text, but Bocskay’s words and Hoefnagel’s nature illustrations form part of the conversation prompted by these occult influences. Even today, Hoefnagel’s illumination of the manuscript sparks debate among scholars about how the interaction of words and images can become an act of creation.
Joris Hoefnagel’s Illuminations
At the end of the sixteenth century, there was an interest in trompe-l'œil (“deceive the eye” or painting in a way that made objects seem real). Still-life paintings - paintings of inanimate objects like food, plants and even kitchenware – became popular, particularly since the Renaissance also saw a curiosity about the natural environment.
Joris Hoefnagel was a Flemish painter, creating miniature images for patrons across in central Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He was known for Trompe-l'œil, for instance using real insect wings in his book of is a book of dragonflies.
In the Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta, Hoefnagel often responds to Bocskay’s scripts with illusionism. The reverse of his Maltese Cross, Mussel, and Ladybird illustration shows the part of the stem of the flower that seems to disappear on the original page.
The Mystery of the Manuscript
Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta is not about instruction. We might expect that the illustrations to bear some symbolic connection to the text. Certainly, Rudolf and his colleagues would have been familiar with Renaissance humanist language of iconography, but there are no such relationships in the manuscript.
The text is a chaotic mixture of Biblical excerpts, prayers, hymns and passages of courtly correspondence. In some cases, Bocskay even wrote in reverse, or in lettering too small to be read by the human eye. At the same time, Hoefnagel’s choices of flora and fauna don’t seem to correspond to the written text in a straightforward way and his creatures are often fantastical.
For instance, in Folio 118, an imaginary butterfly, marine molusk and pear are added to Bocskay’s grometrically laid out micography. Thea Vignau-Wilberg argues that “displaying script at its greatest remove from conventional writing” like this shows the kind of virtuosity that was popular in late sixteenth-century calligraphy; an effort to elevate writing to the status of fine art and a way for the calligrapher to express himself.
So, what are we to make of the manuscript? Hendrix argues that Hoefnagel is making a witty figural response to Bocksay’s text throughout to show that writing is inferior to visual imagery.
Lincoln, on the other hand, points out that Hoefnagel actually mimicked the calligraphic shapes of Bocskay’s script: “Even in the instances where Hoefnagel defies the very integrity of the parchment page with his trompe l’oeil effects, the plants deliberately avoid marring the text, as if mysteriously repelled from the earlier path of Bocskay’s pen…Rather than subverting Bocskay’s scripts, Hoefnagel invests the written forms with apparent influence on his illuminated naturalia.”
Lincoln is right; in this, and other parts of the manuscript, Hoefnagel does complement, rather than obscure the text – but this only adds to Hendrix’s point: Hoefnagel’s illustrations are a competitive response to Bocksay’s text. His spectacular illusions, imaginary creatures and clever compositions are all part of the creative dialogue between words and images.
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