Byzantine Culture

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The Paris Psalter

The tenth-century Paris Psalter contains fourteen full-page miniatures of astonishing classicism, including David composing psalms attended by a personification of Melody. The Macedonian Renaissance in one manuscript.

Manuscript Grec 139 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France is a Greek psalter of the tenth century containing fourteen full-page miniatures. Anyone shown the most famous of them without context would date it to the first or second century AD.

It shows David seated among his flock, playing a harp. Behind him, leaning on a pillar, is a young woman in classical drapery, labelled in Greek Melodia — Melody. A male figure half-reclines on the ground at the lower right, one arm around an urn, labelled with the name of the mountain of Bethlehem. A nymph peers from behind a column. The landscape has depth, the figures have weight and cast shadows, and the whole composition is built on the conventions of Hellenistic and Roman wall painting.

It was made in Constantinople, probably in the middle of the tenth century, for a patron of the imperial court.

The Macedonian Renaissance

The Paris Psalter is the central exhibit in the argument for what art historians call the Macedonian Renaissance: a conscious revival of classical models in Byzantine art and letters under the Macedonian dynasty, roughly from the late ninth to the mid-eleventh century.

The evidence for the revival is broad. It includes the scholarly activity around Photios and Arethas, the encyclopaedic compilations sponsored by Constantine VII, the copying of classical texts in the new minuscule script described in Byzantine manuscripts, the classicising ivories of the Romanos group, and a handful of luxury manuscripts of which this is the finest.

The question that has occupied scholarship for a century is what the painters were working from. Three possibilities have been argued:

Copying late antique models directly. On this view the miniatures reproduce, more or less closely, illustrations in a fifth- or sixth-century manuscript available in the imperial library. The personifications, the compositional types and the technical handling would all be inherited rather than invented.

Reviving a manner. On this view tenth-century painters, steeped in classical art surviving all around them in Constantinople, deliberately worked in an antique idiom without copying a specific book.

A mixture. Which is what most scholars now think, with the balance varying from miniature to miniature.

The Miniatures

The fourteen pages are placed before and within the psalter text:

  • David composing the psalms, the celebrated image described above
  • David killing the lion, a tightly composed action scene
  • The anointing of David by Samuel, with a personification of Meekness
  • David and Goliath, with personified Strength and a reclining figure of the river
  • The coronation of David, flanked by Wisdom and Prophecy
  • The repentance of David, with Repentance behind him, confronted by the prophet Nathan
  • Moses receiving the Law and the crossing of the Red Sea, the latter with a personification of the Red Sea, a Night figure trailing a starry veil, and the drowning Egyptians
  • The prayer of Hannah, the prayer of Isaiah with Night and Dawn, the prayer of Hezekiah, the prayer of Jonah, the song of the three youths

The personifications are the giveaway. Byzantine religious art does not normally include allegorical figures of Melody, Night, Dawn, Wisdom or Repentance; these are the furniture of pagan classical art, and their presence in a devotional psalter is the strongest argument that a late antique model lay behind at least some of the pages.

The Aristocratic Psalter Group

The Paris Psalter is not unique. It heads a group of related luxury psalters — sometimes called aristocratic psalters, in contrast to the marginal psalters such as the Khludov, which illustrate the text with small marginal scenes and polemical iconoclast-era imagery. Related manuscripts survive in the Vatican, in Mount Athos monasteries, and elsewhere.

The two traditions serve different purposes. The marginal psalters are argumentative, crowded with commentary in pictures, made for monastic use. The aristocratic psalters are display books: wide margins, gold, full-page miniatures, and an air of expensive scholarship.

What It Tells Us

The manuscript is evidence for three things worth stating plainly.

Byzantine painters could work naturalistically when they chose to. The persistent idea that Byzantine art is flat and hieratic because its makers had lost the ability to do anything else is refuted by this book and by a handful of others like it. The frontality of an icon is a decision about what an icon is for, not a limitation of skill — a point that also runs through Byzantine iconography.

The classical inheritance was continuously available. Ancient manuscripts, statues, mosaics and buildings were physically present in Constantinople, and educated Byzantines read Homer, Plato and the tragedians as a matter of course. The transmission of that material to the west, described in the transmission of classical learning, depended on the fact that Byzantium never stopped copying it.

The revival was for a narrow audience. A book like this was made for perhaps one patron and seen by a handful of people. It tells us about the taste of the tenth-century court, not about what a provincial congregation saw on the wall of its church.

The Manuscript’s Own History

Grec 139 has 449 folios and measures about 37 × 26 centimetres — a large, heavy book. Its early history is unknown. It was in the library of the Byzantine imperial family or someone close to it, and a note records ownership by a fourteenth-century figure; it later reached the French royal collection, and the miniatures were known and admired in Paris from the seventeenth century onward.

Several of the pages have been trimmed and remounted, and the order of the miniatures is not certainly original. The gold is tooled; the pigments include lapis lazuli and an unusual range of greens and pinks.

It is not normally on display — manuscripts of this fragility are shown rarely — but the pages are digitised and freely viewable through the BnF’s Gallica platform, which is the best way for most people to look at them properly. They repay looking at slowly, and it is worth doing with a reproduction of a Pompeian wall painting alongside.

The Personifications, One by One

The allegorical figures are what mark the manuscript out, and listing them makes the case for a late antique model more concrete than any general statement.

  • Melody (Melodia), a woman leaning on a pillar behind David as he plays
  • Echo (Echo), peering from behind a column
  • The mountain of Bethlehem, a reclining male figure with an urn
  • Meekness in the anointing scene
  • Strength and Arrogance flanking David and Goliath
  • The river, a reclining figure in the same scene
  • Wisdom and Prophecy at the coronation
  • Repentance standing behind David before Nathan
  • Night, trailing a starry veil, at the Red Sea and again with Isaiah
  • Dawn, a boy with a torch
  • The Red Sea, personified as a figure among the drowning Egyptians
  • The desert in the Moses scene

Not one of these is required by the biblical text. Every one is standard equipment in Hellenistic and Roman art. Their presence in a Byzantine devotional book, in a tenth-century manuscript, is the strongest argument that the painter was copying — or deliberately reconstructing — a late antique illustrated psalter.

The Marginal Psalters

Setting the Paris Psalter against the other Byzantine psalter tradition sharpens what it is.

The marginal psalters — the Khludov in Moscow, the Pantokrator 61 on Athos, the Paris Greek 20 — illustrate the text with small scenes crammed into the margins beside the verses they gloss. They are ninth-century, monastic, and frequently polemical: the Khludov famously illustrates a verse about vinegar and gall with a picture of iconoclasts whitewashing an image of Christ, drawing an explicit parallel between the iconoclasts and the crucifiers.

The aristocratic psalters — the Paris Psalter at their head — have wide margins, full-page miniatures, gold, and no polemic at all.

The two traditions were produced within a century of each other in the same city. One is an argument; the other is a display of learning. Together they show that “Byzantine manuscript illumination” is not one thing, and that a patron in tenth-century Constantinople could commission classical allegory or partisan theology depending on what the book was for.

Seeing the Pages

Manuscripts of this fragility are almost never exhibited, and for most readers the practical route is digital.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France has digitised Grec 139 in full on its Gallica platform, at a resolution that permits close examination of the brushwork. The miniatures repay it: the modelling of David’s face, the handling of drapery over the body of Melody, the cast shadows and the recession of the landscape are all visible in a way no printed plate conveys.

A useful exercise is to open the David miniature beside a photograph of a Pompeian wall painting or a Fayum mummy portrait. The kinship is immediate, and the gap of eight or nine centuries between them is the thing that requires explaining.

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