Customer Reviews

Beasts Factual and Fantastic (Medieval Imagination)

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The cover features one of my favorite Getty manuscripts. Inside are photos of beasts from a variety of Getty mss, not just bestiaries. This is another way of getting familiar with their collection. The captions are good, but the photos of the ms. pages are the strength of this book.

For anyone into Medieval illuminations, this book offers page after page of delicious reproductions from Medieval illuminated manuscripts and books. The text and reproductions detail animals - both mythical, fantastical and real in a most enjoyable book. I look forward to purchasing others in the series.

Elizabeth Morrison's BEASTS reproduces illuminations from medieval manuscripts in the Getty Collection depicting various real and imagined animals. The demon trying to tempt Thomas Aquinas and the scene of the animals paying homage to the Christ Child struck me as especially noteworthy.

As a big fan of medieval bestiaries, I can say that this book knocked me out. The Getty Museum has a world-class collection, and both the illustrations and text -- written and compiled by an expert curator -- are illuminating, to say the least. Of course, I'd also recommend a visit to the Getty, to see some of the originals on display there. Even a book as beautiful as this can't do them all justice.