The catalog entry for Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800-1600 lists the volume as containing “222 color and 3 b/w illustrations,” but this bare account fails to capture this lovingly designed, large-format book. Its attractions start on the outside where the page edges are coated with a silvery iridescence so that the 2-inch book block gleams a spectrum as one tilts and dips the whole. Inside, the endpapers echo these edges, their large spread (12 inches tall and 19 ½ inches when open) presenting a softened spectrum from an artwork by the present-day Charles Ross: red through to green and on to blue. Theodoric of Freiberg’s fourteenth-century diagram demonstrating refraction is reproduced on top of these colors, an elegant, lined triangle showing the sun’s rays as they enter four perfectly round water droplets and refract into rainbows, each presenting a different part of the spectrum depending on the angle of the light source and viewer. This is an homage to David C. Lindberg’s Science in the Middle Ages (1978), which featured the diagram on its cover and in its frontmatter, a collection for which Lindberg wrote “The Science of Optics,” his essay ending on Theodoric. [1] Lumen is divided into three parts—“Astral Light,” “Light and Vision,” “Aura and Performance”—and two-page spreads introduce each with a yellow orb emanating as if from the fold of the two pages, fanning out from the top, fading down and across to the edges. The majority of the book is plates and figures, and they are frequently full-page and all pristine in saturated colors.
Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800-1600 accompanied the exhibition of that name at the J. Paul Getty Museum from September 10 to December 8, 2024. The artworks and primary sources from the ninth to seventeenth centuries originated in various locations of learning and craft—Iran, Syria, Cairo, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Poland, Germany, France, Flanders, England, Italy, Spain—that is, the exhibition and the book address large geographical arcs and underline communication across regions and religions, largely the recognized pathways of Greek learning moving Southeast, then Arabic developments returning back to Byzantium and influencing the farther West via al-Andalus and other routes. Kristen Collins, curator of manuscripts at the Getty, and Nancy K. Turner, conservator of manuscripts, gathered the art from as many places as their original locations (only a few from their home institution), and they have put together a diverse range of fifteen essays, each about six or seven pages, by art historians and historians of science in the Middle Ages.
The editors take up a medieval distinction for their title, lumen, meaning “a source of light (such as a lamp), a bright color, or the light of the eye,” differing from lux, “the light of heavenly bodies, of daylight, of dawn” (1). Roger Bacon seems to have said something similar: lumen “is produced in air and other rare bodies” and is “that which is multiplied and generated” from a lux, a light source, but, he concedes “we usually employ lux and lumen interchangeably.” [2] The book covers a variety of qualities of light, and the essays branch out to a profusion of coterminous topics: instruments such as the sighting tube, the armillary, and quadrant; timekeeping via the astrolabe and celestial globes; the eye and sight; the ubiquitous associations of God and light; rock crystal polished into oval cabochons; gold and white among other colors in Greek Gospels, apse frescoes, and mosaics in Byzantine churches; Bibles, Haggadot, and Kabbalist books; stained glass; geometrical manuscript pages and architectural star-and-polygon elements following the Sunni revival in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; church services interweaving light with sound and physical movement. It continues out to the blinding light of heaven and its earthly effects: “Blindness” as “a direct corollary of God’s unbearable light. The concept of divine obscuration” (87) developing from its ancient sources toThe Cloud of Unknowing (and taken up again in Jacques Derrida’s Thinking Out of Sight).
This diversity of topics achieves the explicit aim of Lumen: “to explore the scientific underpinnings of medieval artisans’ understanding and manipulation of light and to demonstrate the ways that such knowledge fed the theological symbolism of both light and vision” (2). The reader is brought to contemplate luminous sources in sunlight, moonlight, starlight, lamplight, and candlelight, and to see their effects in the reflective and refractive materials of glass, crystal, gold, silver, brass, silk, manuscript images, artworks, and the eye. Some essays are encyclopedia-like entries and others close readings of images, some designed to be helpful to the casual gallery-goer and others a little more scholarly, getting into the intricacies of medieval science; some are intelligently factual while others become imaginative, seeking to reconstruct a medieval sensory experience by reaching across temporal gaps. Along these lines Glenn Phillips, the Getty’s curator of modern art, introduces eight artworks from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that accompanied the exhibition—meticulously made prisms, glowing orbs, reconstructed night skies, glittering light rays, and mirrored geometries—by artists who “employ light or take it as their subject in ways that allow visitors today to imagine something of the experience of their medieval forebears” (viii). These works—like so many other recent artworks—are much bigger than book pages, altar pieces, mosaics, and astrolabes, approaching the scale of churches and cathedrals, but the smaller medieval works are surely as involving and affecting as any recent art, even to a museum visitor who only has a moment to spend on them.
Repeat, synthesize conflicts, develop differences, discover new things—the essays explore this variety of medieval reactions to ancient science about light, and in the West, to Arabic analyses of the subject. Of particular significance is Ibn al-Haytham’s Kitar al-Manazir (Optics), which was composed in eleventh-century Baghdad, survives in five Arabic copies from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, and reached the West (in truncated form and causing much confusion) as Perspectiva or De aspectibus around 1300, influencing in particular Roger Bacon, Witelo, and John Pecham. As several essays note, his empirical treatment of light, color, and vision overturned the idea (among other discoveries) that sight projected rays to an object, instead proposing intromission in which a cone form of light lines close in and enter the eye, physical mechanisms interacting with psychological ones to produce the sense that objects remain at a certain distance.
Many artworks in Lumen fascinate. One (plate 7) is a unique astrolabe made by Muḥammad ibn Abī Bakr (37). The typical pronged rete on the front of the instrument, in this variation from Iṣfahān, Iraq, about 618 AH (1220), is attached to five toothed cogs sandwiched between the plates of the whole so that when the rete is turned, they change three portals on the rear of the astrolabe. At the top of the back, a round window contains a white background and a black moon, which will move through its phases. Below, an arched rectangle display will flick through a corresponding lunar date. The lower half has a round window containing two large rotating circles to show the sun and moon’s movements in relation to each other (and to reveal eclipses), and both of these rings are enclosed within a zodiac so the sun and moon will move relative to stars, sometimes distant to and at other moments aligning with a certain astral feature. The astrolabe is said to be the oldest gear train, its precisely toothed gears translating the closer, human phenomena to the realm of the stars and vice versa.
Another enthralling work presents a pair of ilanot (trees) flanking a menorah in a fifteenth-century copy of Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Ohrah (The Gates of Light), a Kabbalist text containing explications of the sefirot, the ten categories or emanations of God (figure 45). On the left a red architectural scaffold contains the ten names for the divine, and on the right the same diagram contains ten kinds of light, such as “light from illumination” and “radiance from splendor” (173).
Also included is an analysis of the Hagia Sophia’s grand beauty, the light streaming in and reflecting and refracting from its gilded interior, “a liturgical instrument tuned by light,” [3] where its “large interior volume and the reflective surfaces of marble and gold mosaics result in audiovisual aesthetics evoking the sea,” the Bosphorus less than 500 meters away (187).
Another pair of works are the stunningly dark grounds of the ninth- or tenth-century Blue Qu’ran and the contemporary Golden Gospels from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Maximin at Trier (plates 78 and 79), the former a very smooth sheepskin entirely painted with indigo and the latter all over violet made from certain lichens steeped in some sort of ammonia, both humble origins imitating Tyrian purple (144, 145). Each has elegant gold writing, shimmering highlights over its dark field, the Qu’ran’s letters almost incomprehensible because the words are subordinated to their graceful stylization and the Gospels in a floral uncial.
The creepiest thing (plate 43) from the chronological end of the catalog, about 1700, is a silver and glass model of one eye (113). Approximately twice the size of a human orb, its silver lids have lifelike folds pulled back to show a white glass sclera enclosing a dead grey iris with a wide, black pupil at its center. The whole round blob is mounted on a silver column like a baroque candle holder in the center of whose stem is a crudely thickened decorative globule of lion heads and dripping foliage. Perhaps its effect is because if we could see to the back, “the retina is actually part of the brain. (Think about that the next time you look deeply into someone’s eyes).” [4]
I have picked out some artworks because the book’s arrangement encourages a less linear, more disconnected experience. Only some of the images the essays discuss are next to the writing, and the editors have also broken up the book’s continuum with three sets of about thirty-five to fifty plates each, so there’s lots of turning pages from the writing to find the plates and figures, and back again. Plate 1 follows figure 15, plate 38 precedes figure 16, and so on. It’s mechanically disorienting busywork.
A recent show of another Light and Space artist at David Zwirner gallery, Doug Wheeler, encouraged the sort of participation one has with the images in Lumen. “Day Night Day” was a space in the gallery into which the viewer entered a magenta mist and was then invited to cross a visual barrier that was there and not there, producing a “perception-bending, full-body freak-out.” [5] Each work in Lumen, like Wheeler’s, “encourages experiential slowness.” [6] So, despite a certain disorientation, the volume beckons for bibliomancy, a reader’s serendipitous discovery of beautiful involvements of art with eye.
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Notes:
1. David C. Lindberg, ed., Science in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1978).
2. Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, in Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. and trans. by David C. Lindberg (Clarendon, 1983), 5.
3. Thomas Whittemore, “Studies of Light,” The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers (Dumbarton Oaks, 1945), MS.BZ.004, box 32.
4. Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso, Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2007), 278.
5. Max Lakin, “Doug Wheeler’s Celestial Wonder, Now Gallery-Size,” New York Times, October 7, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/arts/design/doug-wheeler-zwirner-review.html.
6. Edward Vazquez, “Doug Wheeler,” Artforum, https://www.artforum.com/events/david-zwirner-519-west-19th-street-192135/.