![Single Leaf Excised from a Choir Psalter: Initial E[xultate Deo] with King David Playing the Lute (Psalm 80), Unknown painter, Bologna](https://media.bibleexplorer.app/art/miniatures_david_lute-be9cad1c12.jpg)
An old man in a turban looks up.
Bible in art · Psalms
Single Leaf Excised from a Choir Psalter: Initial E[xultate Deo] with King David Playing the Lute (Psalm 80)
Unknown painter, Bologna · c. 1408
The Cleveland Museum of Art
This huge leaf, over 56 cm tall, comes from a choir psalter made in Bologna about 1408, a book big enough for a group of singers to read. Psalm 81 begins “Exultate Deo” — “Sing for joy to God”.
Inside the letter E, laid with gold leaf, King David stands in a flowered meadow under a starry blue sky, plays a lute and looks up.
From the text
- “Sing for joy to God our strength” (Psalm 81:1)
- “play the sweet-sounding harp and lyre” (Psalm 81:2)
The artist’s own
- David as the singer of the psalms, as painters of psalters usually showed him
- A lute of the painter’s day
Details
David
The lute
He plucks a round-bodied lute.
The meadow
He stands on green grass under a blue sky.
Gold leaf
The letter is set on burnished gold.
Unknown illuminator, Italy, Bologna. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund, 1953.641) · ink, tempera, and gold on vellum · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).