In this portrait, Saint John seems to be caught in the act of listening to a voice,
ready to write down the words. The artist is almost telling us a story about John. But
the narrative impulse is given its fullest expression in the Utrecht Psalter, a
manuscript containing all 150 psalms and 16 other songs known as canticles. Here
each poem is accompanied by drawings that depict its important elements in unified
composition. In Plate 3.9, the illustration for Psalm 8, the artist sketched sheep and
oxen on the bottom left, birds flying and fish swimming on the bottom right, to render
literally verses 8 and 9:
