Published in Mirabilia 1

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2001_09.pdf

The Art history of the Middle Age has been commonly based on the statement that the pictorial-sculptural iconography due its representation exclusively to sacred books. This approach reduce the artistic image to just a visual variant of the text, a mere translocation of the printed word to its formal and material representation with divulgation aims for the unlettered, converting this iconography in a dogmatic one. So, the rich and deep value of the images and their omnifunctionality in medieval society has been misjudged. The text Commentarius in Apocalypsin from Beato had huge publicity in the Hispanic world; with further and multiples copies and illustrations over the next centuries. The thirty-two codices from centuries IX to XIII are enough evidence of the great success of the text. This paper will focus on the relation between text and image to check correlations, dissimilarities, autonomous presentiveness, and plastic innovations that defied the logical system of the time. The illuminators of “Los Beatos”, yet still depending on the canonical versicles and on the commiter demands, produced an iconographical-apocalyptic corpus that testimony a creative freedom, an artistic quality, and a masterfulness on the plasticchromatic ways, that enact those codices as an absolutely exceptional and one-of-a-kind iconographic monument from the Art of the Middle Age.