The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired the Abbey Bible, a 13th-century Italian book that is considered to be an important example of Gothic era illuminated manuscripts. The medieval Bible is named for a previous owner, who was a celebrated collector of Italian manuscripts.
Produced for the use of a Dominican monastery, the Abbey Bible is one of the earliest and finest in a distinguished group of north Italian Bibles from the second half of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, most of which have come to be associated with Bologna, one of the major centers for the production of Gothic illuminated Bibles. Its illumination is a superb example of the Byzantine style of the eastern Mediterranean that played such a dominant role in Italian painting and manuscript illumination in the second half of the thirteenth century.
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