Rome, Trier, Kiev

The Egbert Psalter, also called the Gertrude Psalter, owes its two names not only to a change of ownership between the late-tenth and the mid-eleventh centuries, but also to the transformation of its textual and iconographical content. Polish Princess Gertrude indeed commissioned four Byzantine-style images to enrich the manuscript. These were made in Kiev either by local artists or foreign artists following the local style. This unexpected enrichment of the manuscript shows how an aristocratic laywoman was able to take ownership of a Psalter originally created for a bishop. It also attests to the intensity of the political, matrimonial, artistic and religious relationships between the western and eastern Christian realms despite the Great Schism of 1054. The Psalter's history echoes the studies about cultural exchanges in Hans Belting's Florence and Bagdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science.