King David

A postcard from my Mum and Dad, which recently re-emerged from the pages of one of my books. They'd been at the British Library with some friends to see the exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination; this was about ten years back.

The picture is King David playing the harp. It comes from the Westminster Psalter (BL Royal MS 2 A XXII), produced for the Benedictine monastery at Westminster in around 1200. The manuscript is "royal" because at a later date it was acquired from a collector by Charles II (or was he presented with it?). After all, Westminster Abbey was where coronations and other royal ceremonies took place. 

The artist who contributed this and four other full-page miniatures (ff. 12v - 14v) was, it's speculated, an itinerant specialist, not a monk. His work has also been identified in a manuscript from St. Albans. He may have learned his trade at Winchester, judging from the Byzantine style of e.g. King David's face.

As ever, the mixed perspectives are fascinating. The throne is seen more or less head-on, but the footstool is apparently seen from an angle, or rather from two angles. (Assuming that both structures are basically oblong.) The artist's picture of the Virgin and Child (f. 13v) contains a similar footstool, except you can see one of its back legs. With or without the back leg, these footstools seem to float in space. There's no single point of view. But the play-off between symmetry and asymmetry is evidentl;y important to this picture. Playing the harp necessitates an unsymmetrical way of sitting and placing your feet. David's pink cloak covers one knee but not the other. At the same time the picture captures the full-frontal impact of majesty, like the picture of Christ in glory on the preceding page (f. 14r). 

And also as ever, medieval art asks questions about audience. Who was going to look at this picture? Not the general public, of course. Only the monks who used the Psalter would ever see these full-page illustrations. And even then, not often. Their attention would be on the working pages. And yet the importance of the book, and the prestige of the abbey, cried out for top-quality illumination. Are we looking at a connoisseur abbot's household decoration, or at a pious communal devotional work whose "audience" is God himself? 

But to even ask these questions it to become aware that our concept of audience is historically-bounded. The invention of printing was one crucial step on that journey. Now we live in an era where audience has become distributed, but where it's almost felt to be a human right, and where one of our chief unsatisfied needs is to get attention, more and more attention . . .

 

Westminster Psalter, f. 14v.

Here's the picture in situ and with uncropped border. (You can flick through the whole manuscript here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_2_a_xxii_fs001r ; or read it, if you want to!)

On the facing page, the psalms begin:

Westminster Psalter, f. 15r.

The beginning of Psalm I:

Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non stetit in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit.
Sed in lege Domini voluntas eius et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte.

Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.
But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night.

The later Latin text has "cathedra derisorum", and later translations reflect this, e.g. "the seat of the scornful" in the King James Version.

For medieval Christianity, King David was the author of the Psalms.

According to the traditional Hebrew headnotes, 73 of the 150 Psalms were written by King David; this isn't one of them. But the headnotes are late additions anyway. If David did exist, he would have lived around 1000 BC. A psalm like this was perhaps from around 500 years later. 

When I was at university, one of my teachers said that the oldest biblical story that was likely to be true was the disgraceful one about David, Bathsheba and Uriah (2 Samuel XI). That was because it ran counter to the evident propaganda in David's favour; it would only have been included because the facts were too notorious to conceal. I'm not sure how serious he was being, but others have certainly noted the circumstantial details in this part of 2 Samuel, the remarkable impression of being a narrative from within David's own court circle.  

And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand : so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (1 Samuel 16:23)

The kinnor was evidently a kind of lyre: its trapezium-shaped appearance, with the strings attached to a yoke, is illustrated in the Nineveh relief in the British Museum, and the same shape of lyre existed thousands of years earlier in Sumeria. 

In the Westminster picture, King David is playing a triangular harp (like a Celtic harp): with a column to take the tension, and a curved neck (to keep the strings equidistant). As was normal in Britain (though not elsewhere) the harp leans against the left shoulder. The left hand is playing the treble and the right hand the bass: modern harpists do the opposite.