Le manuscrit lat. 15675 de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, source des inscriptions de la chapelle Saint-Étienne de Westminster

Abstract

The decoration of the St Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster was reduced to rubble during a fire which broke out in 1834. The only surviving materials are several painted brick fragments today on display in the British Museum. They compose two series of Biblical scenes, telling the story of Job and of Tobias. The images are accompanied by inscriptions in Latin elegiac distichs. The purpose of the present article is to confront these paintings and inscriptions with another image-text narrative concerning the story of Job. The iconographical cycle preceding the Moralia in Iob in the fonds latin 15675 manuscript of the Bibliothèque nationale de France also tells the story of Job, and is probably related to the Westminster paintings’ probable manuscript source. As for the inscriptions accompanying the paintings concerning to the story of Tobias, their evident source is the Aurora poem by Peter Riga, whose verses have been extracted and reorganized in an attempt to imitate the already existing model of the Job image-text narrative.