'Book of Kings' medieval picture Bible a gilded action thriller: Book was made for France's King Louis XIV

BALTIMORE - The small boats rolled and leaked. The horses musthave hated the slow voyage. Fodder rotted in the hold. Suits of mailrusted. Thirteenth-century crusading must have been brutal, demandingand dank.

It looks fabulous, however, in the famous painted pages gleamingat the core of "The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library'sMedieval Picture Bible" at the Walters Art Museum through Dec. 29.

There are broadswords on display, and heavy shirts of chain, butthese pale in the presence of the Morgan Picture Bible's brightilluminations, which illustrate the Holy Book but do something elseas well: They offer slam-bang entertainment, and promote holy war.

Their style is High Gothic. They were made by the same people whobuilt France's great cathedrals, and like those stone-and-stained-glass wonders, the pages at the Walters are obviously beautiful knock-'em-out productions excellently executed at extravagant expense.

Not possessing guns, the knights who sailed to Jerusalem to fightfor the Holy Land went about the business of killing its inhabitantschiefly with edged weapons: axes, swords and something called a bill,which looks like a cross between a pruning hook and a spear.

Seven hundred fifty years ago, a French knight well accoutered inthe latest Parisian style would wear a metal shirt, thigh-length andhooded, whose 250,000 interlocking steel rings all were riveted byhand.

What led him into battle was a golden far-fetched vision, piousand preposterous, glamorous and shiny, that is the subject of thisshow.

The French crusaders met in the Walters' exhibition had managed toconvince themselves that they were living in the Bible.

The Morgan Picture Bible - the amazing work of art that crackleslike a fire at the exhibition's center - goes a long way towardexplaining how they came to that belief.

The book was made for King (later Saint) Louis IX of France. Hehad it painted on parchment in Paris in 1250, and it is more thanjust a Bible.

It's a thriller told in pictures. It's an exalted comic book.

It's a comic book because its narrative unfolds with each turn ofthe page, and because it features teams of fighting superheroes, andbecause its main colors are Superman blue and red.

The action is nonstop. You can almost hear the sound effects, thebiffs! and bangs! and arghhhs!

It is exalted because it stars God. It isn't a throwaway. Itscovers, long since lost, were surely gem-encrusted. It wasn't printedon pulp paper as comics are today, but hand-painted by masters.Nearly every page gleams with burnished gold.

Originally the book held 46 leaves, each 15 inches high. Twenty-six are shown.

The story they tell comes straight from the Old Testament,beginning with the Creation, and then forging on relentlessly untilit ends abruptly in the Second Book of Kings.

The Morgan Picture Bible is time-defying and space-dissolving.That's its point. On its brightly colored pages, bold Parisianknights wearing their new outfits and swinging their new weaponsbattle side by side with - and, in effect, become - Samuel andSamson, Joshua and David, as if there were no difference between theIsrael of the Patriarchs and the 13th-century France.

What happened to his book after Louis isn't known completely, butits pages offer clues.