История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 145 стр.

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the doors of St. Sabina much as Serafini intended his readers to understand his

fantastical encyclopaedia: by making up, from the depicted elements, a story and

vocabulary for themselves.

When Gothic art began to flourish in the thirteenth century, and painting on

church walls was abandoned in favour of pictorial windows and carved columns,

the biblical iconography was transferred from plaster to stained glass, wood and

stone.

Then sometime in the early fourteenth century, the images that had been

intended for the faithful to read on the walls were reduced and collected in the

shape of a book. These books were made most entirely out of pictures with just a

few words, sometimes as captions on the sides of the page and sometimes issuing

from the mouths of characters, like the balloons in today’s comic strips. By the end

of the fourteenth century these books of images had become hugely popular, and

they were to remain so throughout the Middle Ages. Essentially, the “Bibles” were

large picture-books in which each page was divided to allow for two or more

scenes, for instance, the so-called Biblia Paurerum of Heidelberg , from the

fifteenth century.

For the literate Christian of the fourteenth century, a page of an ordinary

bible had a multiplicity of meanings through which the reader could progress

according to the guiding gloss of the author or the reader’s own knowledge. A

reader would pace this reading at will, over an hour or a year, with interruptions or

delays, skipping sections or devouring the whole page at one sitting. But the

reading of an illustrated page in the Biblia Paurerum was almost instantaneous,

since the “text” was offered iconographically as a whole, without semantic

gradations, and the time of the narration in pictures necessarily coincided with that

of the reader’s own reading.

The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and

interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines. Not unlike the character

of the woodcut and the cartoon is the TV image, with its very low degree of data