Open Book

Around 1510, in Germany, someone painted this: an open book and nothing else. That was an unusual thing to do. A picture with no saint, no story and no person in it barely counted as a subject then, and the independent still life as we know it would not really arrive for another hundred years. This small panel is one of the earliest of its kind, a book studied for its own sake. We do not know who made it, or why. It may have been an exercise, a display of skill, or a fragment of some larger work now lost. What is plain is the care taken over the pages, painted as a hand-illuminated manuscript with light falling across them, the kind of book that printing was already starting to push aside.