Monday 12th February
WINCHESTER BIBLE
Christopher de Hamel
The glittering twelfth-century illuminated manuscript Bible in Winchester Cathedral is at least an arguable candidate for the greatest work of art made in Britain. Its scale and quality of gilded decoration are astonishing. It is, however, still a very mysterious book, abandoned unfinished probably in the early 1170s. The lecture presents a new and unpublished explanation of who commissioned the manuscript and why, and it provides for the first time a datable chronology for the various artists brought to Winchester from across Europe, and it recounts how some of the illuminations are missing and might still be rediscovered.