When beauty and scholarship are matched, well, it’s matchless. And that is the case with an exquisite exhibition, “Sing a New Song: The Psalms in Medieval Art and Life” on display through Jan. 4, 2026, at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
Added to the quality of the pieces in the Morgan’s Engelhard Gallery, of course, is the fact they constitute the longest and most cherished book of the Bible. The songs or poems included were probably written as early as the 10th century B.C. and as late as the fifth or fourth centuries B.C. The Greek word psalmos, meaning “song accompanied by a stringed instrument,” is the origin of our word psalm, and a handsome Bible in Hebrew at the entrance to the show, open at the Book of Psalms and written by Simon ben Rabbi Samuel for the Jewish physician Vidal Astruc de Carcassone, probably in Avignon, France in 1422, reminds us that we owe the psalms to Jewish writers.
For centuries, King David was thought to be the author of the Book, and a handsome painting of him by Lorenzo Monaco (Florence, c. 1408), lent from the Metropolitan Museum, portrays him as the psalmist, hung next to three leaves of his life’s story from the Crusader Bible (Paris, c. 1244-54). Nearby is a gorgeous leaf showing the Tree of Jesse and the Annunciation from a Book of Hours (a book for private devotion), written in Latin and French (Rouen, France, c. 1495-1503).
The first full room of the show is dedicated to examples of how the psalms were embraced by various communities. Few Jewish psalters survived pillage and persecution, but full attention is given to St. Jerome, with an image of him taking a thorn from the lion’s paw. (Remarkably, he produced three full translations of the Bible, known as the Romanum, the Gallicanum and the Hebraicum.) A manuscript translated into Church Slavonic by Sts. Cyril and Methodius is followed by a leaf from a Coptic and Greek manuscript from the late ninth century C.E. portraying the increasingly common image of the Virgin Mary nursing the Christ Child and then a Middle English one from the hand of the famous Richard Rolle in the mid-14th century.
Enlivening the next room, on teaching the psalms, is another handsome loan from the Metropolitan Museum by the Master of St. Augustine (Bruges, c. 1490), narrating “Scenes from the Life” of the great bishop and theologian, who gave some 8,000 sermons on the psalms, of which 1,000 survive. A manuscript from late 12th century Palencia, Spain, on “Expositions on the Psalms” is opened for us at Psalms 125 and 126.
One of the great triumphs of Gothic art from the late 12th century through the 14th are the numerous illuminations of the Psalms, of which a ravishing example, a single leaf showing scenes from the life of Christ, comes from the Eadwine Psalter from Canterbury (c. 1155-60). It shows Christ with two blind men and then an image of the Prodigal Son. And the show also includes what by common scholarly agreement is the greatest Gothic psalter in North America, the Lewis Psalter, in Latin, from Paris (c.1225-30), on loan from the Free Library of Philadelphia. This extraordinary volume includes an illustrated calendar, a (not uncommon) prefatory cycle of 48 scenes, and, in the Psalter section, illuminated initials (many historiated) marking each of the 150 psalms.
How were the psalms “performed”? In addition, of course, to their liturgical use and their weekly recitation by ordained ministers in the Divine Office, lay devotion (by men and women both) was practiced with commissioned Books of Hours of which a suite of seven owned by the Morgan is shown, beginning with the Cuerden Psalter, in Latin, from Oxford (c. 1270). Opposite these is a large, gorgeous leaf depicting the Ascension from San Michele in Murano, Italy, in Latin, illustrated by Silvestro dei Gherarducci in Florence (c. 1392-99). Here Christ bursts out of the foliated frame of the scene while Mary leads the disciples in rapturous observation.
A quiet, solemn final section of the exhibition summarizes the “uses” of the psalms: their protective and apotropaic uses to ward off evil spirits and do penance; their role in Books of Hours with the Penitential Psalms (6, 31, 37, 50, 101, 129, 142) and the Office of the Dead; and in a stunning coda the prayer book of St. Thomas More (1478-1535), which he had with him in the Tower of London as he awaited his execution. Known as “A Godly Meditation,” it includes final notes by More, who writes that he wished “to think my most enemies my best friends.”
How can we be grateful enough for this loan, from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, won by the exhibition’s organizer, Roger S. Wieck, head of medieval and renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan, with support from an anonymous donor. However cold the coming winter may be, he has given us centuries of incomparable insight into the human spirit at its sensitive heights.
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