YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

VIRTUS SCRIPTORIS: STEPS TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF ILLUSTRATION BORROWING IN MUSIC THEORY TREATISES
St Bavo in Ghent from Saint-Omer in 1336 by Simon, former abbot of St Bertin. 29 It
is a copiously illustrated tome, of which folio 20r, containing the whole of chapter
5, is entirely taken up by the drawing of a labyrinth with the Minotaur at the center. 30
For the medieval reader, the drawing might have conjured up a whole gamut of related
ideas, not the least of which had to be the religious symbolism associated with mosaic
or marble labyrinths adorning cathedral pavements; illustrious examples of these
were found at Chartres, Amiens, Sens, Arras, Auxerre, Reims, and at Saint-Omer
itself. 31 Illuminated manuscript copies of the Liber were constantly produced throughout
the later Middle Ages, and the book could have easily been taken as a source of
inspiration in various disciplines, including music theory, as far as the art of illustration
is concerned. With regard to the scribe of the autograph copy of the Liber, its
modern editor, Albert Derolez concludes that the same hand has written the manuscript
throughout, and that ‘the scribe must have been the author himself, or somebody
working at the author’s direction’. 32 It may be surmised that, perhaps, the less
skillfully drawn illustrations in the manuscript were the work of the same individual,
i.e., the author-scribe or the secretary working under the author’s close supervision:
on the one hand, the labyrinth with the Minotaur at its center is obviously much more
roughly drawn than the superb illustrations of fabulous creatures such as the leo (lion)
and draco (dragon) accompanying the excerpts from Isidore’s De naturis bestiarum
found a few folios ahead; on the other hand, the text written at the foot of folio 20r
– a brief, prose version of the legend – and the names of the characters, inscribed
within the space reserved for the illustration, are all in the hand that has written the
manuscript.
Once established as part of the visual history of a work, illustrations would be
reproduced time and again, as the work itself was being recopied. Producing a new
copy of a book could involve the labor of the same scribe and illuminator who had
copied and illustrated some already existing exemplar of the same work; this would
29 Described and analyzed by Jules de Saint Germain, in J.-P. MIGNE, ed. Patrologiae cursus completus.
Series latina, 221 vols., Paris, 1844–1902, 163, cols. 1003–1031. For an edition of the autograph manuscript
now in the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent / Ghent University Library (MS 92), see Lambert of
Saint-Omer: A. DEROLEZ ed., Lamberti S. Audomari Canonici Liber Floridus. Codex authographus
bibliothecae universitatis Gandavensis. Auspiciis eiusdem universitatis in commemorationem diei
natalis, Ghent, 1968 (henceforth: DEROLEZ, Liber floridus); see also A. DEROLEZ, The Autograph
Manuscript of the Liber Floridus: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer, (Corpus
Christianorum: Autographa Medii Aevi, 4), Turnhout, 1998. Images from the 1460 manuscript in The
Hague have been mounted on the website of the National Library of the Netherlands; see The Hague,
Handschriften, .
30 Capitulum V// Domus Dedali in qua Minotaurum posuit Minos Rex.
31 Very few of these remain: the one at Reims is square-shaped; the one at Amiens, of octagonal shape,
was destroyed in or around 1828 and restored in 1894; and the one at Chartres displays the round shape
that is found in all manuscripts of the Liber floridus and also in the ballade from the Berkeley manuscript.
32 DEROLEZ, Liber floridus, p. viii.
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