British Library Hebrew Manuscripts
Dec. 8th, 2020 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo the British Library have an exhibition on Hebrew manuscripts. While it's been open since restrictions were relaxed, I'm not at all willing to spend several hours in a stuffy basement even if it's technically legal. Missing that is one of my big 2020 disappointments. But it turns out they have made a virtual version.
I haven't been bothering with virtual museum tours; to me they're so far from being a replacement for actually visiting that I haven't felt motivated to set aside the time. But I was so, so excited about this one I decided to give it a go. The virtual version doesn't quite cut it for me; I would have far preferred a schematic where you could actually look at the individual exhibits, rather than a weird first person point of view 3D walkthrough which first of all makes me slightly Doom-sick, and secondly only lets you look at the outsides of the cases and the descriptions, which seems to defeat most of the point. I imagine the software would work quite well for an art gallery where most of the paintings are hung vertically on walls, but for horizontally displayed manuscripts it's a wash-out.
However, there is also an online catalogue, with links to super hi-res digital versions of all the manuscripts laid out in the order of the exhibition. Which is in many ways superior to visiting in person because you can turn the pages, not just look at whatever happens to be on display, and also zoom right in to look at the extremely tiny microcalligraphy. I spent a happy evening ogling this withcjwatson, and then we had another call with hatam_soferet who shared some exciting scribal history facts. We sort of partly used the virtual 3D walk round to read the plaques and learn what we should be looking at, and mainly the catalogue to actually look at the artefacts. We didn't get much past the first section, but it's available until April so most likely we'll go back and look at the rest at some point.
We were particularly excited about the Duke of Sussex Penteteuch which has the most incredible microcalligraphy - see for example the dragon-plant hybrid on folio 16r. I struggled to read it, even zoomed right in, buthatam_soferet pointed out that it's mostly boring Masoretic stuff about counting the numbers of occurrences of certain phrases.
Also super in love with this eighteenth century German Haggadah; the illustrations are incredibly detailed and well worth the high magnification, all kinds of recursive stuff with pictures of a little man reciting the blessings from a book that has a tiny copy of the page he's on. Also, we did something we'd never be able to do in a real exhibition, which is turn to the silly songs from the end of the Seder service. And they are just entirely adorable! Look at folio 39v et seq, for the most amazing Angel of Death, more or less as if Pratchett collaborated with a Mediaeval scribe.
This 14th century illuminated Spanish Bible is kind of ridiculously ostentatious; there are heavily gilded and very detailed diagrams of the Temple vessels on folios 7v and 8r.
If you want to play along I recommend the biggest screen and the most powerful computer you have access to. Both the walkthrough and the ultra hi-res images are quite power hungry, and of course you want the best view possible of the pretties.
I haven't been bothering with virtual museum tours; to me they're so far from being a replacement for actually visiting that I haven't felt motivated to set aside the time. But I was so, so excited about this one I decided to give it a go. The virtual version doesn't quite cut it for me; I would have far preferred a schematic where you could actually look at the individual exhibits, rather than a weird first person point of view 3D walkthrough which first of all makes me slightly Doom-sick, and secondly only lets you look at the outsides of the cases and the descriptions, which seems to defeat most of the point. I imagine the software would work quite well for an art gallery where most of the paintings are hung vertically on walls, but for horizontally displayed manuscripts it's a wash-out.
However, there is also an online catalogue, with links to super hi-res digital versions of all the manuscripts laid out in the order of the exhibition. Which is in many ways superior to visiting in person because you can turn the pages, not just look at whatever happens to be on display, and also zoom right in to look at the extremely tiny microcalligraphy. I spent a happy evening ogling this with
cjwatson, and then we had another call with hatam_soferet who shared some exciting scribal history facts. We sort of partly used the virtual 3D walk round to read the plaques and learn what we should be looking at, and mainly the catalogue to actually look at the artefacts. We didn't get much past the first section, but it's available until April so most likely we'll go back and look at the rest at some point. We were particularly excited about the Duke of Sussex Penteteuch which has the most incredible microcalligraphy - see for example the dragon-plant hybrid on folio 16r. I struggled to read it, even zoomed right in, but
hatam_soferet pointed out that it's mostly boring Masoretic stuff about counting the numbers of occurrences of certain phrases.Also super in love with this eighteenth century German Haggadah; the illustrations are incredibly detailed and well worth the high magnification, all kinds of recursive stuff with pictures of a little man reciting the blessings from a book that has a tiny copy of the page he's on. Also, we did something we'd never be able to do in a real exhibition, which is turn to the silly songs from the end of the Seder service. And they are just entirely adorable! Look at folio 39v et seq, for the most amazing Angel of Death, more or less as if Pratchett collaborated with a Mediaeval scribe.
This 14th century illuminated Spanish Bible is kind of ridiculously ostentatious; there are heavily gilded and very detailed diagrams of the Temple vessels on folios 7v and 8r.
If you want to play along I recommend the biggest screen and the most powerful computer you have access to. Both the walkthrough and the ultra hi-res images are quite power hungry, and of course you want the best view possible of the pretties.
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