A figure with a cross halo raises his right hand towards the birds.
Bible in art · Genesis
The Creation of the Birds and Fishes (Ms. 100, fol. 3, from the Northumberland Bestiary)
Unknown English artist · about 1250–1260
Getty Center, Los Angeles
A bestiary is a book about animals — what people of the Middle Ages believed about lions, ants or pelicans. This one was made in England about 1250–1260; it opens with the days of creation.
The pictures are drawn in brown ink on parchment and only tinted with thin washes. God stands at the left and raises his hand; birds fill the sky and crowd a green hill, where fish lie in the water below.
From the text
- Birds that fly “above the earth in the open expanse of the sky” (Genesis 1:20)
- The great sea creatures and the fish of the waters (Genesis 1:21)
The artist’s own
- God shown as a man with a halo, as painters usually did
- Herons, eagles and a rooster — birds an English reader knew
Details
God
Birds in flight
Eagles and other birds swoop across the top of the page.
Herons
Two long-necked blue birds stand face to face.
The waters
At the foot of the hill, fish and small creatures lie in the water.
Unknown illuminator, English. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Ms. 100 (2007.16), fol. 3) · Pen-and-ink drawings tinted with body color and translucent washes, on parchment · Images provided here are believed to be in the public domain and are available under CC0 through Getty’s Open Content Program. (Getty record: "No Copyright", http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)