28 min documentary, produced/ filmed by Philippe Charluet (broadcast nationally on Australian television). ‘The Medieval Imagination, Illustrated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand’ was a blockbuster exhibition – with over 120,000 people attending – held at the State Library of Victoria. This documentary looks at the bringing together of 90 precious books, containing amazing draftsmanship in opulent colours by artists from the 8th to 16th centuries. It logs the process of organising and curating such an exhibition, including the painstaking process of shipping priceless works of art across the world - including the oldest European manuscript to ever cross the Equator. #medieval #manuscripts #documentary
00:00It's a breviary from the 14th century. It's an English manuscript. It's on extremely thin vellum. It's a very sort of fine quality work. It's full of gold leaf on the illustrations and the decorations around the border.
00:22I imagine they had a magnifying glass because they're a detail that's so refined that you can't see them with the naked eye. I need my magnifying glass to see all the tiny details.
00:38These are the relics of where we come from and they still exist and they are almost indestructible.
00:45We can look at books now that are 500 years old and will still exist in 500 years time and it's something that's part of where we come from and where we're going to.
00:56And I think that's what people really respond to. In a world where we're awash with knowledge and information, they look back at these books and they say,
01:04wow, here was a time when people didn't read, when they couldn't read, where books were like great jewels and objects of great respect.
01:15I think it's extremely important that people living in one era, us today, keep our contacts with earlier ages.
01:26We are people of the present and we must be, but it is not good when the links are cut from the past because I think the world shrinks.
