The playful Flower: Between Beauty and Mortality
Flowers represent the only category of line-fillers in the MS Western 097 that has a recognizable form taken from real life. Painted in either red or blue ink, they appear in a highly stylized form that does not aspire towards naturalism: a star-shaped head with (most frequently) five petals is bent over a simple curved stem. While in most cases the scribe was content with three to four delicate ornaments, flowers occasionally appear as extended strings of seven to eight units, or even as lonely individuals, struggling to navigate the long stretches of empty space.
While line-fillers in this group share enough compositional features to be classified under the same category of "flowers," there is nonetheless a certain degree of spontaneity in the way this ornament was executed across the pages. As can be seen in the carousel, some flowers are oriented towards the west (7r, 28r, 50v), others face in the direction of east (4v), and still others appear entirely upside down (19 r), with the stem floating over the head. This freedom of orientation was combined with a consistency of form - a questionmark for the stem, short rods for the petals, and a large circular middle invariably appear across examples.
What, if anything, can these flowers reveal about the scribe, the manuscript, or the larger cultural context of the monastic community? In folio 19r, we are potentially faced with scribal disinterest, hurry, or simply laziness: while the scribe estimated that four flowers were needed to populate the void surface, only four of them are completed. On the other hand, folio 145r indicates an overly eager scribe, who represented a lavish, colorful bouquet underneath the liturgical text. On this occasion, the flowers should not be treated as a line filler, since their presence does not serve to extend a line of text towards the margin. What, then, is the purpose of the bouquet? I suggest that certain line fillers might have been recognized for their aesthetic value, which enabled them to widen their influence from the realm of functionality into the one of decoration and style. On the other hand, it is possible that the scribe was inspired not by the beauty of the flowers, but by the joy of drawing them. Line fillers are a good example of the category of creativity in which the hand trumps the figure. In other words, maybe the goal was not to conjure up a flower but to honor the will of the hand.
Finally, it is worth noting that all flowers in the MS Western 097 have a withered, bent-neck appearance. Might this be a deliberate evocation of the transience of life, a concept that was so deeply embedded in the learning and practices of monastic communities?
