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The Cistercian order was founded in France at the end of the eleventh century. It began as a break-away movement in 1098, when a group of monks from the Cluniac abbey of Molesme settled in a desolate region south of Dijon, called Citeaux. The Cistercians developed their own attitude to both art and architecture. The earliest Cistercian art to survive is a series of remarkable illuminated manuscripts made at Citeaux between 1109 and 1133, when the abbot was an Englishman named Stephen Harding.
The Moralia in Job contains a series of initials showing monks engaged in everyday tasks, the design of which imaginatively follows the shape of the letter. For example, the initial I becomes the trunk of a tree, with a lay brother cutting of its upper branches with a hand axe, while below him a monk cuts away at the base of the tree with an axe, seemingly oblivious to the consequences of his action for his colleague.
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