Can you imagine that while the monastic choir is singing the most sacred and longest Easter prayer in a medieval cathedral, a screen is simultaneously showing a sequence of colourful illustrations of the individual lines of the prayer?
A thousand years ago, they could already imagine it. Only the screen was missing. In the meantime, they found a way to bridge the gap.
The museum of Bari Cathedral preserves four parchment scrolls, each several metres long, on which runs the text of the public prayer of Easter night, the Exultet. And as the text was slowly rolled upwards on the singers’ lectern, on the reverse side of the scroll, facing the congregation, large painted images descended ever further down, inserted among the sections of text that had already been sung, synchronised with the lines being sung by the choir at that very moment, serving as their illustrations.
The Exultet is the introductory prayer of the most important celebration of the Catholic Church, the Saturday evening liturgy preceding the dawn Resurrection of Easter: Exsultet iam angelica turba caelorum, “May the heavenly host of angels exult…” Imagine that on Good Friday evening, at the symbolic burial of Christ, all lights go out throughout the city, and every hearth is extinguished. At sunset on Saturday, the city gathers in the main church, or each district in its parish church, and the priest begins at the lectern, in complete darkness, a monophonic hymn proclaiming the victory of light over darkness. The hymn passes through the symbolism of light and the prefigurations of Easter, until finally, from the embers of the new fire struck from flint by the acolytes in the churchyard, the great new Paschal candle is lit, and from it each person lights their own candle and carries the new fire home.
The Exultet in Latin, with Spanish subtitles. It would be wonderful to have a version in which the images of the Bari Cathedral Exultet scrolls followed one another in parallel with the melody.
The pulpit of Bari Cathedral, from which the scroll was gradually lowered
First the letter E of the Exultet was lowered, with holy medallions placed at its junctions, signalling the festive opening even to those unable to read
An illustration of the opening of the liturgy, Dominus vobiscum, “The Lord be with you”, showing the celebrating bishop and the concelebrating priests, the deacon singing from the scroll and the choir in the background, with Christ floating above them all, symbolising the unity of earthly and heavenly liturgy. The three-branched candle represents the candle with which the Paschal candle is lit from the newly kindled fire.
The Easter night liturgy, as the “zero kilometre stone” of the entire annual liturgy, is organised around the symbolism of Creation. Just as the Spirit of God hovered over the waters, so now the blessing of the waters follows the lighting of the new fire. In the early Church, on this night, with this new water, every new convert was baptised as an adult. By the time of these scrolls, as the image shows, the increased mortality of children had already led to the practice of baptising newborns.
An illustration of the verse Gaudeat et tellus tantis irradiata fulgoribus, “Let the earth also rejoice, illumined by such great splendour of light”, with the personification of Tellus, Mother Earth
The renewed cosmos is symbolised by a wind rose surrounded by the twelve winds (the points of the compass), with Christ at its centre
Two lines of the hymn also commemorate the bees that produced the wax of the Easter candle, in an almost touching acknowledgement of the sacredness of nature: quod tibi in hanc cerei oblatione solemni per ministrorum manus de operibus apum, “the candle which the labour of the bees and the work of your servants’ hands have made”, alitur enim liquantibus ceris, quas in substantiam pretiosae huius lampadis apis mater eduxit, “for it is nourished by liquid wax, which the mother bee has produced as the substance of this precious lamp”. The illustration depicts the work of bees and beekeepers with the precision of a specialised beekeeping manual, from the capture of the swarming bees in a wicker hive to the production of honey and wax.
The closing image of the scroll is particularly interesting. At the end of the hymn, God’s help is requested (Precamur ergo te…) for the religious and secular leaders of Christianity, and the Bari scroll depicts as the secular leaders two Byzantine emperors, Basil II and his younger brother Constantine VIII, which dates the creation of the scroll to 1024–1025. Southern Italy had been conquered from the Lombards by the Byzantine army in 1018, and Bari was made the centre of the newly established Catepanate of Italy. The liturgy remained Roman and in Latin, but the archbishop of Bari, Byzantius – who, despite his name, was Catholic and Lombard – now had the new Byzantine rulers depicted on the scroll.
It is also interesting that the other three scrolls do not depict the contemporary secular rulers separately, but in the text, in the passage Respice etiam ad devotissimum Imperatorem nostrum N. (“Look also upon our most devoted Emperor N.”), the name of the current emperor was always inserted in place of N., with the previous name scraped away. The palimpsest thus preserved the succession of rulers, from the emperors of 1024 to the first Norman marquises.
The Greek environment also acted as a catalyst in the creation of the scrolls themselves. By this time, in the Western Christian world, the codex – the page-by-page book – had already become the standard medium of information. In the Greek liturgy of southern Italy, however, the scroll was still in use. The Latin clergy who arrived there with the Lombards noticed the scroll’s dignified symbolic significance and began to use it in festive liturgies as well, introducing the “reverse writing” innovation visible here.
The centre of scroll production became the monastery of Monte Cassino, which enjoyed the patronage of the Lombard principality of Benevento. Here they developed the Beneventan script in which these scrolls were also written, a script regarded throughout southern Italy and even in Dalmatia as a mark of authenticity.
Fifty-eight such scrolls have survived in southern Italy. Their use disappeared in the 14th century, with the introduction of the Roman Missal. Yet they survived their Western European scroll counterparts by a thousand years.
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