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Designed at the monastery of St. Hubert in the eleventh century, the Genesis monogram of the St. Hubert Bible (Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale, MS II. 1639, fol. 6v) is one of the masterpieces of Romanesque illumination. The monogram is composed of the IN ligature which opens the text of Genesis, personifications of the four elements, an image of the blessing Christ and depictions of various plant and animal species. The monogram's complex iconographic program gives visual expression to two important themes--creation and redemption--which indicate the unity of the Old and New Testaments. First, the monogram represents the so-called "doctrine of simultaneous creation." The tenets of this cosmogonic doctrine are expressed in Augustine's exegetical studies of Genesis and in the medieval commentary on Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy by Adalbold of Utrecht. Basic to the doctrine is the belief that the account of the six days of creation in Genesis 1 is an allegorical description of a single instant in which God created all things simultaneously. Abandoning the aims and devices of narrative illustration, the monogram's schematic imagery depicts the simultaneous creation of the inanimate cosmos, the plants, the animals and man. Although the monogram's primary purpose is to depict the cosmogonic moment, its representation of the elements and its zoomorphic imagery also foreshadow the fall of man and his redemption. The latter theme is most directly expressed through the cruciform arrangement of the four elements, derived by the monogram's designer from Hrabanus Maurus' De laudibus sanctae crucis. A complex and highly innovative image, the monogram was synthesized from numerous literary and pictorial traditions, and is unique in the body of medieval depictions of creation.