Hildegard von Bingen

Sara Salvadori

SCIVIAS (Know the Ways) is the story of the journey in which the humanity, or bright stars in Eve's womb, join with the stars in the sky; a possibility offered to each soul, to return back to the Light of the origins of the Earth. An experience belonging to Hildegard in her visions and narrated, in obedience to the voice of God, leaving behind her fears, in a precious manuscript where images make the story come alive. The complexity of the prophetic text is difficult for our present times to access, leaving the images enveloped in a kind of symbolism that is hard to decipher. A Journey into the Images of Hildegard von Bingen is born in the hopes of satisfying this desire for knowledge, revealing the Ways the title of the work promises, in a reading guided by images. The central pages present the 35 original-size miniature reproductions with alongside a key that easily illustrates the symbolic meaning and a concise description of the vision. These Plates that offer a grammar of symbols are followed by richly illustrated pages of rhetoric, a themed reading that crosses the entire work where the details of the figures are highlighted against the miniatures. Here each element of the images - colours, frames, forms, numbers - is not random and, after crossing the threshold, leads inside the work. All seems interrelated and connected in an admirable unitary design where the traveller may virtually enter thanks to an accurate 3D reconstruction. The numerous quotations in the text let us be accompanied on this journey by the living voice and figure of this Saint and Doctor of the Church, narrated in the initial Portrait, a real witness to the possibility of walking along the Ways.

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