One Fine Show: “The Book of Marvels – Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages” at the Getty Museum

The meticulous and gorgeous draftsmanship is striking, though it's obvious the people who worked on the manuscript likely never visited the destinations depicted.

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

If you’ve hung out on social media in the last few years, chances are you’ve encountered Trevor Rainbolt, the guy who is preternaturally good at GeoGuessr. Rainbolt wows audiences by guessing the location of a Google Street View image based on nothing but a 360 spin, zooming into features he finds relevant, like the barn that somehow communicates to him, in a second, that this photo was taken in Poland. His skills are so impressive because, for the most part, much of the world looks like all the rest of it. One dusty highway may identify itself to Rainbolt as Brazilian through some obscure feature, but to the rest of us it could just as easily be in Arizona or Dakar.

This planet used to be much more mysterious to its inhabitants, and one of the eras in which that was the case is celebrated in “The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages,” a new show at The J. Paul Getty Museum that showcases the museum’s recently acquired illuminated manuscript The Book of the Marvels of the World, shown in Los Angeles with a second lent by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

The book was produced in France between about 1465 and 1470 by an anonymous artist working from a text compiled by an anonymous author around 1380. An encyclopedia of global oddities, the book is meant to be as entertaining as it is informative, so none of its contents would be considered very politically correct today. Foreigners are frequently depicted as cannibals. Some boast three sets of arms; others have cloven hooves.

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This is easy to overlook given the meticulous and gorgeous draftsmanship and the fact that the people who made this book probably never visited any of the places depicted. Its text is based on folklore, ancient sources like Herodotus—cited to explain why Europeans are “handsomer, stronger, bigger and bolder” than Africans—and supposed accounts from eyewitnesses.

The exhibition in Los Angeles focuses on the book’s depictions of India and Scythia (modern-day Iran), because these feature bombastic colors, and happen to be particularly wrong. The Scythians are depicted as fearsome nomadic warriors without any acknowledgment of their contributions to art and technology, and the Indians are portrayed as savage and monocultural despite the opposite being the case. I don’t have a problem with any of this, personally. I’m sure the handful of literate people in medieval France were subjected to much worse in the way of fake news.

These rich fantasies have much merit outside reality. One depiction of India shows dinosaurs uniting with an elephant and a unicorn. In the foreground, a supine man burns as a nude woman mourns. Nearby a pack of dogs conspires and men with golden fur reach into the river to kiss the finned beasts they find there. Worthy of a fresco, this tiny scene sits at the top of a page. With all due respect to Rainbolt, who cares what country this was supposed to depict?

“The Book of Marvels: Wonder and Fear in the Middle Ages” is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum through August 25.