YEARBOOK OF THE ALAMIRE FOUNDATION

VIRTUS SCRIPTORIS: STEPS TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF ILLUSTRATION BORROWING IN MUSIC THEORY TREATISES
the general page layout and the positioning of the tree diagrams as they relate to the
text.
A rather interesting transformation of approach and technique is visible in
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 515: here the pictor (again, possibly also the
scriptor) did have a plan in mind on how and where to draw the diagrams: he showed,
on folios 46r–47v, rows and columns of note-values encased in shield-shaped or
square outlines; then, on folios 48r–49v, he drew real trees and branches, crowning
the main stem of each tree with a decorative inflorescence. As he worked his way
through this composition, the illustrations became more and more involved, including
a greater amount of purely ornamental elements: the instructive function of the illustrations
was somewhat left behind, while the decorative function of the arbors began
to shine through as the pictor’s main focus.
In Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.9.29 the pictor kept using the compass –
apparently his favorite tool – just as he did in the circular diagrams representing
solmization syllables. His vision of the system (where smaller note-values still stem
from larger ones bearing a schematic resemblance to trees) relays, however, on triangular
shields inscribed in circles and, just like in the case of the solmization diagrams,
his execution of the whole has an element of surgical precision.
Trees of all types – many of them, in fact, of quite imaginary species – are
depicted in an astounding variety of shapes outside the realm of natural sciences
(where they would be expected). Within that realm, and in addition to trees, a plethora
of plants branching off in orderly fashion populate the pages of medieval herbaria,
as in the exemplar of a work attributed to Pseudo-Apuleius, copied in the eleventh
century at Bury St Edmunds and preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley
130, or in a more elaborate version of the same work, copied at about the same time
at St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury – now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole
130. 56
It is highly probable that, within the Christian culture of the Western Middle
Ages, the tree-concept would have found another ancestor in illuminations from
Biblical texts, theological tracts, devout literature, contemporary chronicles of royal
dynasties, and the corpus of rules and regulations promulgated by the Catholic Church
as the code of canon law. The tree represents the idea of natural (or divine) hierarchy
and orderly proliferation: it sprouts from a well-defined point of origin, the root –
which in a genealogical tree may be found in Jesse’s loins, as in the fifteeenth-century
Book of Hours from MS Wittert 28, folio 21v, now kept in the University of
Liège library. 57 The luxuriant vine depicted here in lieu of a tree bears berries and
56 Both have been digitized and can be viewed on the Bodleian Library’s website at
.
57 See Université de Liège, Miniatures.
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