At the National Gallery, Beautiful Beginnings

Because of how we read now -- silently and swiftly -- your eye no doubt sped right on by the B with which this sentence started.

Another B begins "Masterpieces in Miniature: Italian Manuscript Illumination From the J. Paul Getty Museum" at the National Gallery of Art, and this one makes you stop. First it stuns you with its opulence, then it snares you in its tendrils. Its shape is all a-shimmer. It makes you look again.

The B is from a prayer book, a manual for monks. It was painted on a parchment page in 1153, when people marveled still at written words in lines. This letter is a promise. It prepares you for the wondrous. It's a lot more than a B .

It is also, simultaneously, a pack of dogs caught within a thicket. These otherworldly animals are jubilantly snapping at interlacing vines with leaves of deep blue and stems of burnished gold.

The initial they inhabit also stands for riches. Think how long it took to pound its gold to leaf, to calculate its spirals, to grind its precious pigments. Its blues are lapis lazuli, which cost as much as gold.

That letter is a portal, too. It's like a great cathedral doorway constructed to take you out of this world and admit you to another full of mystery and power. Not everyone can enter. First you have to read.

There are 45 manuscripts -- entire books and bits of books -- in the Getty's exhibition. Most were painted between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Michelangelo in 1564, and most were read aloud.

The B -- for Bea tus vir . . . ("Blessed is the man . . .) -- initiates, in the Latin Bible, the first line of the First Psalm. Devised at Montecassino, the vastly wealthy mother house of the Benedictine order, it was painted at a time when most reading was a sacred act, neither swift nor silent. Every day, in unison, the monks there read the psalms. And every week those learned men intoned all 150. The B restarts the cycle. Prepare to hear the Word of God is the message it delivers. Try to hear, in memory, the chanting of the monks as you wander through this show. Also hold in mind what an awesome thing a book was in Roman Catholic Italy -- when books cost more than houses, and herds of goats were slain to provide their parchment pages, and, except for clergy, few people could read.

Books were very rare: In 1424, the rich and renowned library at Cambridge University, which now possesses more than 7 million volumes, owned 122.

Books for Christian worship -- like most of those on view --were more than texts; they were reliquaries. Like little jeweled chests for the finger-bones of saints, or for splinters of the Cross, these volumes held the holy. They contained the Word of God.

To preserve His message in a string of small black marks, and to put these in a book, must have been regarded as a fabulous technology. Pages such as these held the key to one's salvation. The church itself relied on them. No wonder books intimidated, but pictures were accessible. Everyone reads pictures.

Those in the exhibit are neither fully word nor fully picture -- they partake of both.