β: This is a Beta release of the Fitzwilliam Museum's potential new website.
We want to co-design
our Virtual Museum presence with you.
You can return to our current site at any time.
Following the Government announcement yesterday, museums and galleries in Cambridge will be closed to the public as part of a period of national/local restrictions. So, with great sadness, we will not be able to reopen as planned on 2 January 2021.
This online exhibition presents a selection of the manuscripts displayed in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary exhibition 'COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts' (30 July–30 December 2016). An exhibition of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is a fitting celebration of the Museum’s bicentenary. The Fitzwilliam preserves the finest and largest museum collection of illuminated manuscripts in existence, and manuscripts were at the heart of the Founder’s collection with which the Museum was established in 1816. Among the treasures which Richard, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745–1816), bequeathed to the University of Cambridge were 130 illuminated manuscripts.
