walters gallery

Medieval Missal and More on Display at Walters

By Menachem Wecker
Special to the HERALD
(From the Issue of 12/21/06)

Knowing that a camel is likelier to crawl through the eye of a needle than the rich are to enter heaven, St. Francis denounced his aristocratic parents’ hypocritical, money-dominated way of life, and set out in his beast-colored tunic to preach to the Assisians about love, peace and his trademark, the humane treatment of nature and animals, for which the Church has named him the patron saint of ecology.
Two Assisians joined St. Francis in his journey, which according to the Legend of the Three Companions, led him and his companions to the church of San Nicolo in Assisi. The trio hoped to match Gospel quotations with its theology, but the three were at a loss to find appropriate scripture. Francis decided upon the technique sortes sanctorum (“the lot of the saints”), opening the altar copy of the Bible three times (symbolic of the Trinity) at random. He first opened Jesus’ advice (Mt 19:21), “go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” Miraculously, both subsequent openings yielded the same sort of advice to embrace poverty and humility: “Take nothing for your journey … neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece” (Lk 9:3) and “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Mt 16:24).
What some are calling that very text that Francis consulted — the San Nicolo “Saint Francis” Missal, dated to Umbria, Italy, somewhere in the late 12th century or early 13th century — is now on display at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, in the exhibit “For This is My Body: The Medieval Missal.” The show is designed to coincide with the recent reopening of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a few blocks from the museum.
The exhibit collects three eucharistic vessels — a chalice, monstrance, and ciborium — and 15 missals — three printed and 12 manuscripts. A missal is a liturgical book designed for priests to use during the celebration of Mass. Effectively “how-to” guides, missals attend to all aspects of the Mass, from scriptural quotations to texts for feasts honoring local saints to musical guides for responsive singing. The Walters show focuses largely upon illustrations that decorate the parts of the missal devoted to the Canon of the Mass, the part of the service devoted to the Crucifixion. Indeed, the exhibition owes its name to the Canon’s most dramatic moment, where the priest raises the Sacred Host and says, “Hoc est enim Corpus meum” (“For this is my Body”).
According to the continually streaming documentary at the exhibit, Henry Walters bought the St. Francis missal in 1914 from Joseph Baer, a librarian in Frankfurt. Walters, whose money came from the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, had opened the Walters Art Museum in 1909 to house the collection which he inherited from his father. But Walters took the first step to shaping the collection in his own image in 1902, when he purchased for $1 million the entire collection of the Roman Palazzo Accoramboni. The collection included the then-unpopular El Greco painting, “St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata,” which is in the current missal show.
According to the posted information at the Walters, there is evidence both for and against the missal’s claim to have been touched by St. Francis. The illuminations are relatively modest. They have no gold or expensive pigments, which suggests they were used at a small provincial church like San Nicolo. Additionally, the missal is dated to the right time period, between 1172 and 1228; Francis lived from 1182 to 1226.
But all is not well for those who hope to ascribe the missal to Francis. Many of the accounts of the Legend have Francis consulting a copy of the Gospels, not a missal. And perhaps most problematic is the first verse that Francis was said to have read from Matthew, which does not appear in the Walters missal altogether. All is not lost, though, for some cite a parallel verse from Mark (10:21), which does appear: “go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.” If the Mark verse is adopted, all three passages are prominently located atop their respective pages in the missal, which would make them easily noticed. It also seems logical for Francis to have found texts from three different Gospels in his random search, rather than two.
If true, the book could fetch a great deal of money at auction, especially after the recent record-setting sales of the mere mortal, Gustav Klimt. A publicist for the Walters said, “The museum does not give monetary value to collection pieces,” and an official at the Basilica did not want to comment on the missal’s value, because the Basilica has no “direct affiliation with this exhibit, nor does the St. Francis Missal belong to us.” But regardless of value and even for those who do not “look at it through the eyes of faith,” as the exhibit documentary puts it, the illumination of the manuscript is breathtakingly beautiful.

For This Is My Body: The Medieval Missal
Nov. 4, 2006 — Jan. 28, 2007
The Walters Art Museum
600 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Md.
410/547-9000 www.thewalters.org