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English Romanesque art suffered immeasurable losses as a result of subsequent iconoclastic excesses Especially frescoes and panel paintings in ecclesiastical settings were destroyed by fanatic adherents of John Wycliff in the fourteenth century and by Protestant zealots in the sixteenth, nor were sculptures, reliquaries, and many other church accessories spared. Yet in one field Romanesque painting found a saving refuge: between the covers of exquisite illuminated manuscripts.
Towards the end of the twelfth century, a new type of book appeared: the richly illustrated bestiary, a book on animals based both on biblical and late-antique sources in which poetry and truth, legend and natural science, the exotic and the local were combined into a colourful kaleidoscope of creatures. Encyclopedias with a tendency to the sensational, bestiaries met the needs of a public that was thirsty both for knowledge and entertainment.
Among surviving manuscripts of this type, the specimen that came to Oxford University in the late seventeenth century is one of the oldest and most beautiful picture series. We know neither the artist nor the exact locale in which the book was made. Yet one thing seems certain: it was available to voracious readers in a Cistercian monastery. The codex, luxuriously adorned with gold leaf and additional passages of silver, contains 129 miniatures, fabulous depictions of animals, plants, and human figures, executed in brilliant colours deployed in lucid, calm, symmetrical compositions.
The illustration shown is on whales, on the verso of folio 86.
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