Golden Books
Channel: British Library
Date: 2022-08-03

This event took place on the 12 of July 2022. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

In this recording, Art historian Professor Lucy Freeman Sandler of New York University explores medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and books, such as those on display in our summer Gold exhibition.

She focuses on the ways gold was employed by scribes, artists, and goldsmiths to give meaning to written texts, painted images and metal book covers known as ‘treasure bindings’. 

The talk ranges across the varieties of gold script and the kinds of texts for which they were used, to the many aspects of the use of gold on pages, from gold motifs in border decoration, to gold in the figures, objects, and backgrounds of pictorial images.

In exploring the art and meaning of the use of precious metal in the golden books of the past, we can come to understand an important element of the history of human artistic creation.

Introduced by Dr. Kathleen Doyle, Lead Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library.

Professor Lucy Freeman Sandler is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History emerita at New York University and author of Penned and Painted, being published by the British Library this summer.

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