The Citadelle Art Museum's Newest Exhibit - Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts

AMARILLO, Texas - June 13, 2023 - PRLog -- The Citadelle Art Museum is pleased to present Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th – 18th Centuries, which includes more than thirty-five works—some with elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament— from medieval Bibles, Prayer Books, Psalters, Books of Hours, Choir Books, Missals, Breviaries, and Lectionaries drawn from the collection of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, who organized the exhibition. Examples of the materials—parchment, vellum, gold leaf, and minerals which were ground into pigments—used by artists before the age of printed books to create these extraordinary pages are also featured in the exhibit. The exhibition opens today, June 13th, and will be on view through November 18, 2023, on loan from the Reading Public Art Museum. This collection has never been exhibited west of the Mississippi River.

Highlights include a lavish Bifolio from a Book of Hours with illuminations by Joachinus de Gigantibus de Rotenberg (German, active 1440s – 1490s), a Perugian Leaf from a Dominican Missal from the late fourteenth century, a large Bifolio of a Spanish Choir Book from the fifteenth century, a Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther from the eighteenth century, and a leather-bound Italian Gradual containing the chants for the mass penned in the 1720s.

Most of the works date from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries and are created with ink on parchment or vellum (animal skin). French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, and German examples will be included in the exhibition. Additionally, non-western sheets, including a sumptuous seventeenth-century leaf from the Koran and Shahnameh (the illustrated Persian Book of Kings) pages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all of the sheets came to the Reading Public Museum through Otto Ege, a well-known Cleveland-area bookseller, and specialist who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for 65+, and FREE for children 18 and younger. Museum hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11-4. Visit https://www.thecitadelle.org/ or call (806) 323-8899 to plan your trip.