Codex Caesareus Upsaliensis
Uppsala, Universitetsbibliothek Uppsala, MS C 93
This lavish page shows an emperor draped in gold and purple garments and presenting a golden book to two saints on a shared throne. It offers an idealized vision of events that transpired in the middle of the eleventh century, when the German emperor Henry III sponsored the construction of a massive church in Goslar, his favorite city, and endowed it with lavish gifts dedicated to his two patron saints, the apostles Simon and Jude. While the original manuscript is now one of the chief treasures of the university library in Uppsala, Sweden, this facsimile was produced in 1971 and was considered revolutionary in its own time because of new printing techniques that were able to approximate the look and feel of the original book – the texture of the gold, the weight of the pages – more closely than had been possible before.
The author of the modern facsimile, Carl Nordenfalk, was a leading medievalist of his generation and Mellon Professor in History of Art at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Facsimiles like inspired Nordenfalk to organize Color of the Middle Ages (1976), a University Art Gallery exhibition that celebrated the new technologies that allowed astonishingly accurate copies of famous illuminated manuscripts to be printed. Although the global pandemic has prevented the installation of a similar physical exhibition in 2020, the transition to an online format allows us to explore the ways in which medieval manuscripts and facsimiles can be reproduced in digital media – a shift in technological possibilities that is every bit as transformative for the study of medieval manuscripts today as advances in print media were for Nordenfalk fifty years ago.
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- Golden Books Maria-del-Carmen Barrios