IN THE PAST FEW DECADES, the accomplishments of medieval polymath and visionary Hildegard von Bingen have gained widespread recognition. The Benedictine abbess was born in 1098 and, over the course of her long life, excelled as an artist, composer, and author. She extended the melodic range of sacred music, wrote sizable tomes that combined her deep studies of botany and medicine, and even found time to invent an alphabet. She also wrote and illustrated three works devoted to the apparitions she regularly beheld beginning at the age of five. The manuscript of Scivias (a contraction of the phrase Sci vias Domini, or “Know the ways of the Lord”) features a series of thirty-five miniatures that portray twenty-six visions, each one based on a biblical redemption or creation story. The narrative charts a spiritual journey toward salvation, and the illuminations were designed to emphasize and clarify Hildegard’s moral instruction. While there is some question about her role as the actual artist, the frontispiece shows her recording knowledge that descends in the form of lightning, and the accompanying text describes her heavenly mandate: “O fragile human creature, all ash and rot, tell of and write about what you see and hear.”
This volume reproduces these compositions and provides a detailed and necessary key to elements that might otherwise be indecipherable. How else would you know that a ropelike greenish band is rotten wood and thus represents the pagans who should be cut away, or that bowls of cheese represent genitals and reproduction? The Market of Temptations, ca. 1151, is densely populated with a variety of figures: a fanged and fire-breathing serpent whose four distinct flames roast different groups of people—the unbaptized, laymen, those on their way to heaven, and those described in the key as “halfway between the clouds and the earth.” In the panel just below, there’s a “market” where godly desires are traded for carnal ones. The boldness of Hildegard’s colors and patterning, as well as the pictures’ symbolic density, calls to mind the work of another spiritually inspired artist, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), who also sought to create an earthly likeness of divine communication. Across nearly a thousand years, both women did so via the interplay between vivid geometric structures and biomorphic forms. In a miniature envisioning the Three Persons (left), a depiction of the Holy Trinity, the constraint of the ornamental border is broken by the power of the concentric circles. The bright outer ring—the “most serene light”—represents God the Father; the dark yellow ring, the “glowing fire” of the Holy Spirit. Both bands are threaded through with vibratory, outward-pulsing lines. In the center, the figure of Christ is stillness personified, even as he “spreads the splendor of true clarity through the world.” Whether ominous or ecstatic, Hildegard’s cosmos is a radiant, exquisitely intricate realm.
