The Bible of Alba

The Anthropomorphic Themes of the Divine Presence

Abstract

In this article we will focus on the Old Testament biblical scenes (neither the preliminary miniatures that illustrate the bible's commission, nor the marginalia) with exclusive attention to the representation of the divinity, since we consider that it is the topic of greatest controversy within the Jewish-Christian crossroads. Our objective is to observe in what way this divine presence has been plastically shaped and what graphic solutions it has adopted throughout the manuscript. For this we will first analyze some of the miniatures that have been classified as "God-Christ" by the scholar Sonia Fellous, pointing out the variants of representation. Later, we will propose other images that we have called the "Angel of God" and the "Bust of God" and that were not included in the classification of Fellous as representations of God, but that we believe are iconologically related to the divine presence. We will try to justify it by means of a comparison exercise between the image and the text that it illustrates.