en-People of the book

Reading the very last page of Geraldine Brooks' s novel "People of the book" (translated as "Le livre d'Hanna" in French), and being impressed by this extraordinary human adventure around a book, I started the absolute challenge of summarizing in a single image the waltz of the hands that shaped it and then transmitted it through times...

For the "book of Hanna" is in fact the Haggadah of Sarajevo, a Hebrew book about the Seder ceremony during Passover (Jewish Easter) dating from the Middle Ages and classified as a UNESCO World Heritage... 

In her novel, the author alternates scientific-historical truths and fictional additions to tie up the course of this book preserved successively by Jewish, Christian and Muslim hands, defying prohibitions and destruction through the centuries... 

After some iconographic internet searches, I worked on a pattern on paper with the collage technique of real-scale images to make a composition that reflects the idea of ​​hands around, from a surrealist point of view while remaining anchored into reality...

Thus, for example, the hand that wears the greenstone-ring in the center is that of Andrea Pataki, the true conservator of the haggadah in accordance with this document .

The hand on the right represents that of Cardinal Vistorini who saved the book from an autodafé in Venice in 1609 by signing it with his hand (and that the author imagined as a converted Jew - frequent practice at the time) that I symbolized by a forced right-handed position.

The black hand painted with henna is that of the Muslim slave represented in one of the illuminations of the haggadah and imagined by G. Brooks as the artist who made them. 

Its position shapes, with the other hand on the left, an imitation of the famous ones in Michelangelo's "creation of Adam". 

The side ornaments come directly from the real haggadah. 

Finally I affixed a semi-Apollo butterfly "Parnassius Mnemosyne" (name of the goddess of Memory) whose the author, as a supreme symbol, imagined a wing stuck between the pages of the book during its stay in the Alps during WWII... 

The haggadah being dated from the 14th century in Spain, golden age and home of leather carving, I wanted to pay by this way a well-deserved tribute to it, for it transcended beliefs and survived the worst moments of humanity, as well as a tribute to the fascinating fiction that it inspired, a real lesson in culture and humanity... 

In 2020, this carved painting was selected for the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes exhibition-competition of Atelier d'Art de France (french arts and crafts Union)... and was encouraged by the artistic commission of the Luxembourg Art Prize...