Text & Spirit

For the first time, the Museum Angewandte Kunst is showcasing its complete collection of late medieval illuminated manuscripts in the Text & Spirit exhibition. These include books and fragments decorated with exquisite illuminations and ornaments in gold, lapis lazuli or purple. What use are books of hours from the Middle Ages to us today though? Text & Spirit sheds light on various parallels between then and now, drawing a comparison between the books of hours and today’s smartphones.

The focus lies on the impact of both as life companions, which are simultaneously means of communication and objects of prestige. Their significance reaches the status of fashionable, performative accessories. The exhibition thus offers a new perspective on medieval books of hours based on the 21st century as the age of digital communication. The exhibition is part of a digitisation project funded by the Department of Culture and Science of the City of Frankfurt am Main.

As part of the digitisation project, the Museum Angewandte Kunst selected works of art from its collection that were rarely or never exhibited and researched before due to their fragility and exceptional value: Christian prayer books from the late Middle Ages in the form of psalters, breviaries and books of hours as illuminated manuscripts. They represent a tradition in which books served less to impart information but rather took on the role of a medium that facilitated the spiritual organisation of life through the process of absorption. As companions of daily life, they structured the day, the week, the year and life as a whole.

The illuminated prayer books became highly exclusive and prestigious luxury objects that demonstrated devoutness and functioned as externalised proof of making provisions for heavenly salvation during the lifetime: They became fashionable, performative accessories instrumental to the act of seeing and being seen.

The reference to the usage of smartphones opens up a new realm of imagination in terms of comparability between the epochs. This concerns both the media-related role of books of hours and of smartphones in their capacity not only to be life companions at the interface between communicative, text- and image-based transition strategies, but also to structure daily schedules and express them in a relevant and performative way. The fact that the use of both media leads to a mental detachment from the immediate environment and becoming encapsulated in the mind is particularly impressive. In both cases, this is the prerequisite for mentally connecting with another sphere and entering into communication outside the immediate surroundings.

Another topic is the preciousness of the codices as the most expensive objects of their time. How does the value of things that people pay for come about and how much of their lives are they prepared to invest? This raises the question of what value can mean. The exhibition addresses this by means of an LED treadmill displaying the ten most expensive objects in the world. The Concept Store Maria, which will temporarily be hosted by the museum on the occasion of the exhibition, will be open on Sundays between 2 pm and 5 pm as well as on special museum occasions. It will invite visitors to engage with the question of value in an applied form.

In the exhibition the manuscripts, with their illuminating aesthetic composed of text, painting, and the employment of precious materials, will be shown in the original. Accompanying questions relating to everyday rituals, standards of value, fashion, art, restoration, or religion open up a dialogue with these books and their epoch. For a later, independent study of the theme, the exhibition also includes 12 video interviews with experts and in-depth literature as an accompaniment to the digital copies. 

Curator:  Dr Eva Linhart (Head of the Book Art and Graphics Department of the Museum Angewandte Kunst) with Francesco Colli and Sandra Doeller (Design)
Director: Matthias Wagner K 
Press contact: Natali-Lina Pitzer, T +49 (0)69 212 75339.