Reuniting the Paduan Bible Picture Book

Blog series Medieval manuscripts

Author Elena Lichmanova, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts

An art project of remarkable ambition and a precious witness of the Paduan vernacular in the late 14th century, the Paduan Bible Picture Book has had a turbulent life. It was envisaged as one of the most detailed cycles of Bible illumination. Three main artists spent around ten years producing the opening books of the Old Testament; the rest have either not survived or never existed. At an unknown date, the parts of this Picture Book were divided, two of which have been preserved in prominent collections.

Genesis and the Book of Ruth were acquired by de Silvestri family and in ca. 1860 donated to Accademia dei Concordi in Rovigo (MS 212). The books of Exodus to Joshua were purchased by the English book collector Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843), and sold after his death, in 1844, to the British Museum Library (Add MS 15277). The two portions of the Bible have now been temporarily reunited in Padua, their place of origin, for an exhibition that explores late 14th-century Paduan art and culture: The Paduan Bible Picture Book. The City and Its Frescoes. The exhibition takes place in the Diocesan Musem of Padua and is open until 19 April 2026.

At the turn of the 15th century, Padua had a vibrant cultural scene, fuelled by the presence of the University, the de Carrara court and the figure of Francesco Novello, lord of Padua 1390–1405. A growing appreciation for the local language was one manifestation of a city’s strong identity, and Francesco gathered a group of learned men who produced for him books in both Latin and the vernacular. The Carrara Herbal (Egerton MS 2020) shows the level of learning and artistry at Francesco’s court. It is a collection of medical knowledge about substances drawn from plants, animals and stones, originally authored in Arabic by Serapion the Younger and copied (and probably translated into Italian from Latin) by Jacopo Philippo of Padua. The Herbal’s illuminations stand out as some of the most skilful medical illustrations from this period. The Paduan Bible Picture Book originates from the same milieu and was painted by a group of artists now known as the Masters of the Paduan Bible Picture Book. It is composed in Italian with Paduan and Venetian inflections of the period and is the only known example of an illuminated Bible in the Italian vernacular.

The project was a grand undertaking: the British Library’s portion of the Bible contains 530 illuminations, and the extent of the whole design can only be guessed. We don’t know what came first, the text or the images, but one hypothesis is that a single person devised the entire book, and the illuminations were painted first. The author had to divide the text of the Bible into cogent scenes, summarising each one and translating them into Italian. They likely drew not on the Latin Vulgate but Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica, a creative 12th-century retelling of biblical events widely used as a university schoolbook. The Paduan manuscript also shows the influences of vernacular French bibles. Its Book of Genesis starts ‘en lo començamento’ which corresponds not to the Latin Vulgate’s ‘in principio’ but to ‘en commencement’ of the French Old Testament.

Once the content of each scene was envisaged and translated, the actual design of the book began. Its pages were divided into squares for the illuminations, assembled into quires and distributed between several artists. A single scribe who might have also been the text’s author wrote the captions in a beautiful round Italian script known as Gothic Rotunda.

The result is an unusual manuscript with a dual narrative, both visual and verbal. It is indeed a Picture Book, a rare and costly form of medieval comic strip that enjoyed popularity in England and France but was exceptional for Italy. Its illuminations visualise the biblical episodes in gripping — and painstaking — detail. In the Book of Exodus, we follow the story of Moses, from his birth to the erection of the Ark of the Covenant. The narrative culminates in a key moment when Moses receives the Ten Commandments. We watch him preparing two stones to write the Commandments, ascending the mountain to face God in glory (here depicted as something between ‘burning fire’ (Ex 24) and a ‘cloud’ (Ex 34:5)), and then returning with the testament to the people of Israel. But Moses is now horned. His horns are an idiosyncrasy of medieval and Renaissance art and a result of a mistranslation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin: they meant to represent the transformed face of Moses after conversing with God.

After Moses descends from the mountain, work begins on the Ark for the Testament. Beseleel and Ooliab, skilled in every craft, construct the Ark, carving its sculptures and columns, embroidering its curtains, making garments for the first priest, and designing the seven branched candelabrum, all according to the word of God. Dressed like 14th-century Paduan citizens and placed within contemporary Paduan interiors, Beseleel and Ooliab must have felt acutely familiar to the original audiences of this manuscript. Square windows framed by arches, pink walls with white carvings or the craftsmen’s instruments – all these snapshots of Paduan material culture articulate the deep connection of the Picture Book to its original context.

We are delighted that the British Library portion of the Paduan Bible Picture Book can now be seen alongside its counterpart from Rovigo as well as other objects representing the creativity of late-14th-century Paduan culture.

The exhibition takes place in the Diocesan Musem of Padua and is open until 19 April 2026.