The Canticle of Creatures

The Canticle of Creatures

A rendering of St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of Creatures in Arabic, in the style and materials of the Qarmatian Qur’an, complemented with foraged earth and plant pigments.

The Canticle of Creatures: Also known as Laudes Creaturarum (Praise of the Creatures) or the Canticle of the Sun, it was composed around 1224 in Umbrian, the Italian dialect native to Francis.

The Qarmatian Qur’an: This is a very beautiful manuscript of which relatively few leaves survive, and in much altered condition. It was made in Persia or Central Asia, and is tentatively dated to 1180 or earlier.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 29.160.23

I reconstructed the script, which I believe was a one-off variant of mainstream Eastern Kufic, by studying a number of pages. I must specify I’ve never seen a page in the flesh, only in photos, which is far from the ideal way to deduce the materials used, but as the calligraphic tradition was quite consistent and this was a luxury production, I’m fairly sure of the core pigments I can see: carbon ink for the rasm (the core text), vermillion for harakāt, lapis lazuli for sukūn, and verdigris for shadda, hamza and ihmāl (no green is visible in any photo but all these are brown or burned through, which betrays the use of this unstable pigment. It’s also consistent with tradition.) The borders and verse markers are clearly illuminated with shell gold. The elaborate scrolling vines of the background appear to be done in (organic, plant-based) ink rather than (mineral) pigment, but I could be wrong on this point. It’s just that the variety of colours used (some pages still show a red, yellow or blue background pattern), the way some have faded, and the motif itself, which is more practical to do with a pen and a fluid colour, all suggest this medium. In any case that’s what I decided to go with.

The Materials:

• Carbon ink (midād) for the rasm.
• Cinnabar for harakāt, verdigris for shadda and i’jām, lapis lazuli for sukūn.
• The borders are painted with two shades of yellow ochre I personally gathered on the same site, near Tannourine in Mount Lebanon
• For the punctuation markers, shell gold is laid over a background of lead tin yellow (instead of orpiment, which would have been used but is highly toxic), and shell palladium over a light grade of azurite (I used palladium instead of silver to avoid the severe tarnishing silver goes through).
• The background pattern is drawn with different organic inks, some of which are traditional (from the western or eastern tradition or both), others my own:
Pages 1-2 (praise, carmine): Lac
Page 3 (sun, golden yellow): Chamomile
Page 4 (moon, blue): Privet
Page 5 (air, yellow): Buckthorn
Page 6 (water, teal): Privet
Page 7 (fire, scarlet): Wallflower
Page 8 (earth, green): Iris
Page 9 (the forbearing, brown): Horse chestnut
Pages 10-11 (death, purple): Poppy
Page 12 (praise, orange): Pomegranate flower
• The end papers are dyed with horse chestnut husks, and painted with lac.
• The cover is bookcloth paper, the flap embroidered with gold thread.