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The great Winchester Bible was written and illuminated by a team of artists at Winchester Cathedral between about 1160 and about 1175. The paintings of the Winchester Bible must rank among the greatest works of art ever produced in England. The finest have a quality unmatched anywhere in Europe in the twelfth century. There is great elegance too in twelfth-century English coloured initials in the text. The main colours of these are red, pale blue and green. Sometimes brown, purple, yellow, and other colours were also used.
This page of the Winchester Bible (folio 169r) shows the characteristic combination of illumination and text, of figurative an scenic ornamentation of initial letters with two-column calligraphy of the highest quality. The page with the end of the books of Jeremiah and the beginning of Baruch has two large illuminated initials. On the left is the prayer of Jeremiah, following Lamentations. It shows Jeremiah with a scroll, praying to God. Across on the right, at the start of Baruch, is an even larger initial showing the prophet reading from a manuscript before the King Jechonias and all the people in the city of Babylon.
The initials are the works of an illuminator referred to as the Master of the Morgan Leaf. His style shows the influence of the Byzantine mosaics of Sicily. This influence is most evident in the initial R that opens the prayer of Jeremiah. In the bowl of the letter is a majestic figure of God, resembling that of Christ Pantocrator (Christ as the ruler of all), an image found in the mosaics at Cefalu. Below, Jeremiah appeals to God, holding a scroll in his hand. As with the Sicilian mosaics, the figures are set against a highly burnished gold background, and have heavy facial modeling with the features clearly delineated. Jeremiah has a haunting, fixed, melancholic expression, a device no doubt borrowed from Byzantine art, but nevertheless reflecting a new emphasis on human values in Western society.
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