Walafrid Strabo: Picturae Historiarum Novi Testamenti

This series of short verse inscriptions describes scenes from the New Testament, apparently composed as captions (tituli) for a cycle of paintings. Each scene receives one or two hexameters, separated in the text by the marker ‘AL.’ (alius, ‘another’). The series follows the Gospel narrative: the angel’s promise to Zacharias, the Annunciation, the angel reassuring Joseph, the Visitation, the naming of John, the shepherds, the Magi, the flight into Egypt, the Innocents, the boy Jesus among the doctors, and onward to the miracles, such as the widow’s son raised, the beheading of John, the feeding of the five thousand and the walking on the water.

Verse tituli were a common Carolingian genre, written to explain wall paintings in churches and to fix the meaning of images, a topic debated in the period. This cycle is valuable evidence for the iconographic programmes of Carolingian churches, which have mostly been lost. Its compressed lines, each summing up a scene, show the economy of the genre, and the work is attributed to Walafrid Strabo in the printed tradition.