The  J. Paul Getty Museum has added a prized, 750-year-old Bible from Italy to its noted collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts, and the museum says it will go on display December 13 as a highlight of the upcoming exhibition, “Gothic Grandeur: Manuscript Illumination 1250-1350”.

The Getty’s announcement says that the so-called Abbey Bible, named for a former British owner, was created in the mid-1200s for a Dominican monastery. According to museum officials, it  “is one of the earliest and finest” illuminated Bibles to have emerged from Bologna in northern Italy, “one of the major centres” where scribes turned Latin scripture into art.

The museum wouldn’t say what it spent to acquire the Bible this summer.

via LA times