Review: Ange Mlinko on the Book of Psalms

The most copied and translated book of the Bible, beginnings of a form at once personal and universal

If you are moved, as I am, by the outlandish dreams of medieval Christian monks as rendered in their altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts, then Tree of Jesse from the Tickhill Psalter (circa 1310) might be just for you. Tree of Jesse depicts the father of the greatest Hebrew patriarch supine and sleeping; from his groin a vinestock grows, sprouting tendrils; the tendrils circulate upward, bringing forth leaves and grapes, forming an elaborate interlacing scaffold for a throng of perching figures—prophets—barefoot, reading from scrolls. Forming the axis of the tree in ascending order are King David playing his harp, his descendents the Virgin and Child, and at the apex, Christ. Various birds of peace and of prey are scattered through the foliage.

There is even more going on than I have room to tell, but the busy composition is so intricately drawn and harmoniously colored (cobalt, burnt orange and gold, pale green rhythmically distributed), that you can’t take your eyes away from it, nor can you be completely unconvinced that human procreation does not advance to a single flowering that orders a cosmos. Each prophet with his scroll grasps a part, but not all, of the story. The whole of the chronology can only be encompassed in the image, and at the center of the image is David, who became the court musician for King Saul between slaying the giant Goliath and being anointed by the prophet Samuel. He, it is said, wrote the one hundred and fifty songs in the Tehillim, or Book of Psalms.