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Book/Journal Title Dumbarton Oaks Papers START STOP
Publisher Harvard University Press 27 Pages: 209 235
Chapter/Article The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, ca. 1200- Additional Pages:
Author/Editor R. S. Nelson Additional Pages:
Publication Year (1995), Additional Pages:
Place of Publication Cambridge, Mass. Additional Pages:
Volume v 49 Additional Pages:
Edition Additional Pages:
Additional Pages:
R. S. Nelson. ((1995), ). The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of Illuminated Byzantine Manuscripts, ca. 1200- Additional Pages:
1450, . Dumbarton Oaks Papers. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, pp. 209-235.
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The Italian Appreciation and Appropriation of

Illulninated Byzantine Manuscripts, ca. 1200-1450

ROBERT S. NELSO N

wenty years ago when I was preparing my dissertation on one of the illustrated
T Greek manuscripts still in Istanbul, I was struck by an obvious question that I have
yet LO d ispel: Where have all the other manuscripts gone and why? Of course, I kne'w
the general patterns of transmission. I was aware of the large holdings of the monasteries
of Ml. Athos, and I had already worked in the major collections of western Europe. But
I was no t prepared for the enormity of a cultural tmnslatio that can perhaps be best
grasped through simple statistics. Today there are only a few hundred Greek manu
scripts in Istanbul, versus well over four thousand manuscripts in both the Bibliotheque
Nationale and the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, about twelve hundred in the Biblio
leca Laurenziana and in the Biblioteca Nazionale di San Marco, and smaller, but not
insignifi cant holdings in the Biblioteca Comunale of most any Italian town of even mod
erate size. I If the comparison is restricted to art historically important manuscripts, the
difTere nces are at least as great. The fingers of one hand suffice to enumerate the manu
scripts yet remaining in IstanbuJ,2 whereas the C01PUS deT byzantinischen Miniaturehand
sch1-iften will extend over many volumes and perhaps several generations before it is done
with western European collections.
Many manuscripts that once filled the libraries of Constantinople, of course, no
longer exist due to acts of God and man . In the latter category, we know, for example,
that large numbers were destroyed in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest in 1453.
Doukas reports, for example, that books "without number ... were carried off in wagon

I Statistics taken from M. Richard , Repertoire des biblinlheljue.\ el des catalogues de nwnuscl'iLIgrecs, 2nd ed . (Paris,

1958). 1 am not aware of a .~)stematic survey of the patterns of the collecti,ng of Greek manuscripts in Istanbul
after 1453, but important evidence for that history is to be found in J. Raby, "Mehmed the Conqueror's
Greek Scriptorium," DOP 37 (1983), 15-34, with further references. A useful early account is E. Jacobs,
UnterslIchungen WI' Geschirhte der Bihliothek im SeTal zu Kcmstantinnpel, SBHeid (1919).
2The three most important illustrated manuscripts in the Patriarchal Library have recently been pub
lished in color in The Oecu'l71.enical Patriarchate: The Great CinlTch of Christ (Athens, 1989), Egs . 119-158. In the
library of the lopaki Sarai , there are two principal manuscripts, both from the 12th century, the famous
Octateuch (cod. 8) and a Psalter with commentary (cod. 13). On the former, see J. C. Anderson, "The Ser
aglio Octateuch and the Kokkinobaphos Master," DOP 36 (1982) , 83-114; and on the latter, see A. W. Carr,
Byzantine Illumination, 1150-1250: Th e Study of a Provincial Tradition (Chicago, 1987), 226-27; and most inter
estingly Raby, "Mehmed," 22-23 n. 40 , in which the manuscript is shown to have been in jvlehmed's col
lection .
210
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 211

loads and dispersed in all directions to the east and west .. . Gospels with all SOrts of
decoration with ou t measure 'were eithe r sold, or th rown away, after p ulling up the gold sarion to the Republic of Ve nice, the nucleus of the present Biblioteca Marciana , 482
and silver."" The destruction of sacred books, the son tha t would have been decorated manuscripts. 1S T he basic point is that something fundamental happened to the textual
was confirmed by the me tropolitan and late r cardinal Isido re of Kiev, who was wounded basis for Greek culture by 1500, a nd it happe ned in Italy.
Restricting myself to decorated man uscri pts, I wish to reexamine this patte rn of
in the conquest and late r managed to escape ca ptivity. He may also have been the SOUl'ce
fo r the r eport of the h umanist La uro Qu erini th at 120, 000 Greek man uscripts had been rransmissio n , as my contribution to th e d iscussion of "Byza nti nes and Italians," groups
lost in the sack of Constantinop le . I When Ae neas Silvius Piccoiomini, later Pope Pius II, in need of defi ni tion and entities that converge and diverge across a con tin uu m of society
received tl1e news of the fall of Constantin ople, he exclai med , "What shall I say of the and culture. For a studen t of Byzantine art, accustomed to its "tadpole" model of culture,
oun tless books, as yet unknown to the Latins, which were the re [in Constantinople]? that is, large head (Co nstan tinople) and small body (provinces), the specter of the hydra
Alas, how ma ny names of great m en will n ow perish! Here is a second death for Homer model of Italian culture is daunting. Since my study concludes in th e mid-fifteenth ce n
and for Plato too. Where are we now to seek the philosop hers' and th e poets ' works of tury with the domination of certain centers in central and northern Italy, I will intention
ge nius? The fount of the Muses has been destroyed. "" Also alarm ed by this threat to ally slight th e history of manuscript acquisition and production in sou thern Italy and
Greek cu lture, Cardinal Bessar ion com missioned scribes to buy or copy ma nuscripts for Sicily, partly because the Greek-speaking mo nasteries and churches of that region be
h im : "As long as the common an d single hearth of the Greeks [Constantinople] remained longed more or less to the Byzantine commonwealth, producing their own illuminated
stand ing, I did no t concern myself [with gathering manuscrip ts] because I knew they manuscripts and perhaps importing other such books from Constantinople,9 and partly
were to be fo und there . But when, alas! it fell, I conceived a great desire to acquire all because h umanists mined those collections for their treasures, just as they d id those far
these works, not so m uch for myself, who possess enough [or my own use, but i()r the ther east. 10
sake of the Greeks who are left now as well as those . . . in the future." 6 My frame is simple chronology, and my intention is to understand general patterns.
I hasten to add that my present -concern is not primarily the production of Italian or
To a certain extent, the accoun ts of destructio n in Constantinople are exaggel'ated ,
and one wonders by what calculation it was decid ed that 120,000 ma n uscripts had per Byzantine art per se . Th us 1 will avoid the notion of artistic influence, a concept so vague
ished , but the losses must have been significallt. Yet enough su rvived in the capital and as to obscure more than it illumines, and one that rests upon specious assumptions of
the provinces of the former emp ire to ma ke manuscript sleu thing in the East a minor cultural superiority-on either side of the equation. I I Yet a clearer notion of what illus
indus try fo r at least thr ee h undred fi ft y years, or sometime into the ninetee nth century.7 trated Greek manuscripts were available when and where in Italy is presumably not
This cultural app ropriation began du rin g the late Mid dle Ages and the Renaissance and irreleva nt to the history ofItalo-Byzantine artistic contacts. The Italians will be my princi
at the beginning was overwh elmingly d ominated by Italia ns. It is use[u l to recall that the pal concern in this account, because it is they who appreciated and appropriated these
royal libra ry of France, th e ancestor of the na tional collecti on, had not a single Greek artifacts, in the etymological senses of valuing and recognizing their worth and making
manusc ript until the late fi fteenth century, at a ti me when the Va tican Library held 800 them their own, I ~ In the process, the prior significances of those objects were trans
Greek manuscripts, that of the Medicis in Florence 600, and that given by Ca rdinal Bes formed . The new meanings engendered by this cultural appropriation belong to the
hislory oflate medieval and early modern Italy, but in so far as institutions and collecting
' Jiisl oria byza nfilUl, Bonn ed. (18 34) , 31 2. patterns of that period survive to the present, th ey also constitute foundational strata for
'A. Pertusi, La caduta di Cos/aillirwj)li: Le trs/,htlo1iianze dei COnlnnj)(mmei, I (Verona, 1976), 78, 38 1 n. 25; the co nstruction of values, classifications, and disciplines in our world .
K. M. Setlon , 7/l e p(/j)(lc), anrilh e Levrlllt, II (Philadelphia, 1978) , 13 1.

"Setto n , PajNICY, 1I, 150.

"D. J. Gea nakoplos, (;leeh Schola.rs in Venice (Cambridge, Mass. , 1962), 81-82. "J. lrigoin , "Georges Hermonyme de Sparte: ses manllscrits et son enseignement a Paris," Bullrli n de
7 By the mid-1 9th century, the great d ays of ma nuscript collecting in the East ap pea red to be over to judge l'Associul;fJ11 Gaif/rlU m.e Bude, ser. 4 (1977), 23.
fro m the somewhat dispiri ted account of H. O. Coxe , Report 10 Her Maje~t)"\ COTlenlmenl on Ihe Cleek Ma nllscnj)ts 9Southe rn Italian illumination is surveyed in A. Grabar, Les rnanuscrils grecs enlumine.1rie provenrl1lCl! ilalienne
Yet Remaining itl the Libraries of Ihe Levant (London, 1858) . Coxe had set Out to visit little-studied Levantine (IXc- Xle sieeles) (Paris, 1972). In recent yea rs, the most noteworth y publication o n the illustra ted manuscripts
:ollections and to ascertain their holdings. H is principal motive appears to have been acquisition, but he of this region has hee n the paper by N. G. Wilso n, "The Madrid Scylitzes ," Serillura e Civiita 2 (197S), 209-19.
presented himself as only a scholar, Lo r "it was th ollght that the proprierors o f libraries , more especially th e He concludes tha t the manuscript in question was produced in Palermo in the midd le of the 12th century
princip als of religious socie ties, would be more li kely to welcome the stud ent than the trader" (p. I). Few afte r an illustraterl model impofLI: d from Constantinople. For some illustrated Greek ma nu scripts tha t might
Illonasteries, howe ver, were willing to p a rt with their ma nuscri p ts, no ma t.ter what strategy was employed. have co me to Sicily in th e twelfth century, see notes 30-32 below.
"Indeed, I ma y here Sl1lte a t once, thal the id ea of purchasi ng from large proprieto rs, especially religio us 'OFor example, Cardinal Bessarion secured a numbn of manuscripts from so uthern collectio ns . See N.
foulildations, was altogether hopeless. " Bur o nly a few years ear lier, he was told man uscript:; Were sold readily Wilson , "The Book Trade in Venice f'a. 1400-1515 ," venezia, LentTO di !l1cril:aziol1 f Ira Orinlle e Occidente (se(.oll
(p. II ). Certainly Robert Cu rzon was able to bu y a number of Cree k manuscrip r.~ , many illustra ted , onl y a XV-XVI): Aspetti e problemi, Ii (Florence , 1977), ~8 6; idem , From. Byzuilliurn 10 Itllly: Greeh SIu.dies in flw fl aliun
d ecade or so ea rlier. See his Visits II) M onasteries in the Levant (London, 1849; repro London , 1983), where th e Renaissance (Baltimore, 1992), 62; E. Mio ni , "B essa rione bibliofilo e filologo," RSKY, n.s ., 5 (196 8), 7 1-72
spirit of O rientajism is not e xactly concealed . Even he, however, was aware th at many othe rs had preceded lists several.
h im: "so tho roughly were these ancient libral-ies ex plored in the fi ftee nth Century, that no unknown classic "On this last point, see the comme nts, fo r e xa mple, ofOleg Grabar in his review o fR. Wittkower, Selec/,':rl
author has been discove red" (p. 10). Ill umin ated manuscriptsIVere still obtained through th e Lls ual variely of Lec/ures, in Speculmn 67 (1 992), 236.
means well into this century; most Of lhose now in American collections, for exa mple, had yet to be uprooted. I ~ 1 further consider the co ncep t of "appropriation" as opposed to "influence" in an essay tha t will appear
in a volume titled Critical Term.5 fOT Arl Hislory, cd . R. Nelso n and R. Shiff (Chicago, in press).
210
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 211

loads and dispersed in all directions to the east and west .. . Gospels with all SOrts of
decoration with ou t measure 'were eithe r sold, or th rown away, after p ulling up the gold sarion to the Republic of Ve nice, the nucleus of the present Biblioteca Marciana , 482
and silver."" The destruction of sacred books, the son tha t would have been decorated manuscripts. 1S T he basic point is that something fundamental happened to the textual
was confirmed by the me tropolitan and late r cardinal Isido re of Kiev, who was wounded basis for Greek culture by 1500, a nd it happe ned in Italy.
Restricting myself to decorated man uscri pts, I wish to reexamine this patte rn of
in the conquest and late r managed to escape ca ptivity. He may also have been the SOUl'ce
fo r the r eport of the h umanist La uro Qu erini th at 120, 000 Greek man uscripts had been rransmissio n , as my contribution to th e d iscussion of "Byza nti nes and Italians," groups
lost in the sack of Constantinop le . I When Ae neas Silvius Piccoiomini, later Pope Pius II, in need of defi ni tion and entities that converge and diverge across a con tin uu m of society
received tl1e news of the fall of Constantin ople, he exclai med , "What shall I say of the and culture. For a studen t of Byzantine art, accustomed to its "tadpole" model of culture,
oun tless books, as yet unknown to the Latins, which were the re [in Constantinople]? that is, large head (Co nstan tinople) and small body (provinces), the specter of the hydra
Alas, how ma ny names of great m en will n ow perish! Here is a second death for Homer model of Italian culture is daunting. Since my study concludes in th e mid-fifteenth ce n
and for Plato too. Where are we now to seek the philosop hers' and th e poets ' works of tury with the domination of certain centers in central and northern Italy, I will intention
ge nius? The fount of the Muses has been destroyed. "" Also alarm ed by this threat to ally slight th e history of manuscript acquisition and production in sou thern Italy and
Greek cu lture, Cardinal Bessar ion com missioned scribes to buy or copy ma nuscripts for Sicily, partly because the Greek-speaking mo nasteries and churches of that region be
h im : "As long as the common an d single hearth of the Greeks [Constantinople] remained longed more or less to the Byzantine commonwealth, producing their own illuminated
stand ing, I did no t concern myself [with gathering manuscrip ts] because I knew they manuscripts and perhaps importing other such books from Constantinople,9 and partly
were to be fo und there . But when, alas! it fell, I conceived a great desire to acquire all because h umanists mined those collections for their treasures, just as they d id those far
these works, not so m uch for myself, who possess enough [or my own use, but i()r the ther east. 10
sake of the Greeks who are left now as well as those . . . in the future." 6 My frame is simple chronology, and my intention is to understand general patterns.
I hasten to add that my present -concern is not primarily the production of Italian or
To a certain extent, the accoun ts of destructio n in Constantinople are exaggel'ated ,
and one wonders by what calculation it was decid ed that 120,000 ma n uscripts had per Byzantine art per se . Th us 1 will avoid the notion of artistic influence, a concept so vague
ished , but the losses must have been significallt. Yet enough su rvived in the capital and as to obscure more than it illumines, and one that rests upon specious assumptions of
the provinces of the former emp ire to ma ke manuscript sleu thing in the East a minor cultural superiority-on either side of the equation. I I Yet a clearer notion of what illus
indus try fo r at least thr ee h undred fi ft y years, or sometime into the ninetee nth century.7 trated Greek manuscripts were available when and where in Italy is presumably not
This cultural app ropriation began du rin g the late Mid dle Ages and the Renaissance and irreleva nt to the history ofItalo-Byzantine artistic contacts. The Italians will be my princi
at the beginning was overwh elmingly d ominated by Italia ns. It is use[u l to recall that the pal concern in this account, because it is they who appreciated and appropriated these
royal libra ry of France, th e ancestor of the na tional collecti on, had not a single Greek artifacts, in the etymological senses of valuing and recognizing their worth and making
manusc ript until the late fi fteenth century, at a ti me when the Va tican Library held 800 them their own, I ~ In the process, the prior significances of those objects were trans
Greek manuscripts, that of the Medicis in Florence 600, and that given by Ca rdinal Bes formed . The new meanings engendered by this cultural appropriation belong to the
hislory oflate medieval and early modern Italy, but in so far as institutions and collecting
' Jiisl oria byza nfilUl, Bonn ed. (18 34) , 31 2. patterns of that period survive to the present, th ey also constitute foundational strata for
'A. Pertusi, La caduta di Cos/aillirwj)li: Le trs/,htlo1iianze dei COnlnnj)(mmei, I (Verona, 1976), 78, 38 1 n. 25; the co nstruction of values, classifications, and disciplines in our world .
K. M. Setlon , 7/l e p(/j)(lc), anrilh e Levrlllt, II (Philadelphia, 1978) , 13 1.

"Setto n , PajNICY, 1I, 150.

"D. J. Gea nakoplos, (;leeh Schola.rs in Venice (Cambridge, Mass. , 1962), 81-82. "J. lrigoin , "Georges Hermonyme de Sparte: ses manllscrits et son enseignement a Paris," Bullrli n de
7 By the mid-1 9th century, the great d ays of ma nuscript collecting in the East ap pea red to be over to judge l'Associul;fJ11 Gaif/rlU m.e Bude, ser. 4 (1977), 23.
fro m the somewhat dispiri ted account of H. O. Coxe , Report 10 Her Maje~t)"\ COTlenlmenl on Ihe Cleek Ma nllscnj)ts 9Southe rn Italian illumination is surveyed in A. Grabar, Les rnanuscrils grecs enlumine.1rie provenrl1lCl! ilalienne
Yet Remaining itl the Libraries of Ihe Levant (London, 1858) . Coxe had set Out to visit little-studied Levantine (IXc- Xle sieeles) (Paris, 1972). In recent yea rs, the most noteworth y publication o n the illustra ted manuscripts
:ollections and to ascertain their holdings. H is principal motive appears to have been acquisition, but he of this region has hee n the paper by N. G. Wilso n, "The Madrid Scylitzes ," Serillura e Civiita 2 (197S), 209-19.
presented himself as only a scholar, Lo r "it was th ollght that the proprierors o f libraries , more especially th e He concludes tha t the manuscript in question was produced in Palermo in the midd le of the 12th century
princip als of religious socie ties, would be more li kely to welcome the stud ent than the trader" (p. I). Few afte r an illustraterl model impofLI: d from Constantinople. For some illustrated Greek ma nu scripts tha t might
Illonasteries, howe ver, were willing to p a rt with their ma nuscri p ts, no ma t.ter what strategy was employed. have co me to Sicily in th e twelfth century, see notes 30-32 below.
"Indeed, I ma y here Sl1lte a t once, thal the id ea of purchasi ng from large proprieto rs, especially religio us 'OFor example, Cardinal Bessarion secured a numbn of manuscripts from so uthern collectio ns . See N.
foulildations, was altogether hopeless. " Bur o nly a few years ear lier, he was told man uscript:; Were sold readily Wilson , "The Book Trade in Venice f'a. 1400-1515 ," venezia, LentTO di !l1cril:aziol1 f Ira Orinlle e Occidente (se(.oll
(p. II ). Certainly Robert Cu rzon was able to bu y a number of Cree k manuscrip r.~ , many illustra ted , onl y a XV-XVI): Aspetti e problemi, Ii (Florence , 1977), ~8 6; idem , From. Byzuilliurn 10 Itllly: Greeh SIu.dies in flw fl aliun
d ecade or so ea rlier. See his Visits II) M onasteries in the Levant (London, 1849; repro London , 1983), where th e Renaissance (Baltimore, 1992), 62; E. Mio ni , "B essa rione bibliofilo e filologo," RSKY, n.s ., 5 (196 8), 7 1-72
spirit of O rientajism is not e xactly concealed . Even he, however, was aware th at many othe rs had preceded lists several.
h im: "so tho roughly were these ancient libral-ies ex plored in the fi ftee nth Century, that no unknown classic "On this last point, see the comme nts, fo r e xa mple, ofOleg Grabar in his review o fR. Wittkower, Selec/,':rl
author has been discove red" (p. 10). Ill umin ated manuscriptsIVere still obtained through th e Lls ual variely of Lec/ures, in Speculmn 67 (1 992), 236.
means well into this century; most Of lhose now in American collections, for exa mple, had yet to be uprooted. I ~ 1 further consider the co ncep t of "appropriation" as opposed to "influence" in an essay tha t will appear
in a volume titled Critical Term.5 fOT Arl Hislory, cd . R. Nelso n and R. Shiff (Chicago, in press).
212
ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 213
1. T H IRTEENT H AN D FO URT EE NT H C ENTU RIES
Besides the Vienna Dioscurides, other illuminated manuscripts also changed owners
For my purposes, the Venetian-led occupation of Constantinople in 1204 would ap after 1204. The early eleventh-century Psalter of Basil Il received Easter tables for the
pear LO be a logical beginning and a meaningful bou ndary between two different histori_ years 1206 to 1225, possibly suggesting a new provenance. Thereafter, it lOO may have
cal epochs. For decades, a rt historians have posited the impact of Byzantine illuminated remained in Constantinople, for a Greek entry notes that in the fifteenth century it be
manuscri pts on Western medieval art, but Hugo Buchthal observed in 1966 that we know longed to a monastery of the Peribleptos, possibly to be associated with the establishment
of on ly one illu minated Greek manuscript that was in the West before 1204. The manu_ ofLhat name in the capital. Cardinal Bessarion acquired the Psalter later in the century. 20
script in question, a kind of "export-ware," is a Psalter, made about 1077 for the church Secondly, that large, handsome Gospel book in Parma, Palatina 5, has Greek entries from
of St. Gereon in Cologne, and, thus, far from I talyl3 As far as I know, Buchthal's general the years 1230 and 1231, indicative perhaps of new ownership. The subsequent history
observation still holds, and I am not aware of any securely documented case of an illumi_ of the m anuscript is not known until it reaches Lucca and the possession of a mercantile
nated Byzantine manuscript in Italy, excluding Sicily, before the thirteenth century.11 family prominent from the fifteenth century. 21 In the case of a copy of the homilies of
What I have found surprising is that for some time after 1204 the situation does not John Chrysostom on Matthew, presently Mt. Sinai cod. 364, ownership, but again not
seem to have changed dramatically Here it is instructive to contrast the western Euro location changed. Equipped with well-known portraits of Constantine IX Monomachos,
pean reception of icons or relics from Constantinople. 15
Lhe empress Zoe, and her sister Theodora, the manuscript was probably given by Con
The Latin possession of Constantinople apparently devastated its manuscript pro stantine to the monastery of St. George of Mangana, which he had founded in Constanti
duction, although Greek manuscripts continued to be produced in outlying regions, as nople. Indeed a thirteenth-century hand has "catalogued" the manuscript as follows:
16
Giancarlo Prato has shown . At the same time, long established collections were dis "hie liber est quintus monasterii beati georgii de mangana in Constantinopoli." 22 Such
persed, and older manuscripts acquired new owners. Thereafter, many manuscripts an entry must date between the initial occupation of the monastery by Latin clergy in
remained in stable collections well into the fifteenth century For example, a thirteenth_ 1207 and the city's return to Greek possession in 1261. 23 What happened to the manu
century Latin note in the famed Dioscurides manuscript in Vienna suggests that its con scrip t during the late Middle Ages is not known, but it probably remained in the East,
text, but not its location, may have shifted after 1204. Yet the manuscript must still have because it was corrected in Greek by a fourteenth-century hand and is next documented
been in Constantinople in the thirteenth century, because, first, it was made for the sixth in sixteenth-century Crete. 21 In sum, the Latin occupation disrupted patronage and li
century Constantinopolitan patron and, second, the manuscript is well attested in that braries. Yet I have found minimal evidence that illustrated Greek manuscripts were as
city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Then it belonged to the monastery of St. yet being taken from Byzantium to Italy, even in the case of a book such as the Sinai
l
John Prodromos in Petra ? and was seen there by the most successful of the Italian manu Chrysostom, which belonged to an institution controlled by the papacy. The exceptions
script
18 hunters, Giovanni Aurispa, during his second voyage to Constantinople in 1421 that I can deduce are worth contemplating, because they suggest the singularity and the
23. According to Doukas, the Prodromos-Petra monastery, as well as the nearby monas significance of these objects in late medieval Italy.
tery of the Chora, was overrun by the Turks at the fall of the cit '9 Mter further My first example concerns the famous Cotton Genesis, that fifth-century Greek
y
vicissitudes, the manuscript was purchased for Emperor Maximilian II in 1569.
manuscript studied in great detail by Professors Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler in
'''As reported in E. Kitzinger, 'The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth their 1986 book and represented with Sir Robert Cotton in a contemporary portrait, a
Centuries," DOP 20 (1966), 35. See now A. Cutler, The Aristocratic Psalters in Bywntium (Paris, 1984),89. by then venerable tradition of depicting a man of culture with an illuminated manu
"For Sicily, note the examples of Palermo, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Dep. Museo 4 (see below, notc 30), script. 25 For more than a century now, we have known that this early Byzantine codex or
and the supposed model of the Madrid Scylitzes (above, note 9).
a sister manuscript was the model for the atrium mosaics at the church of San Marco in
15 A useful case study in the importance of Byzantine relics for a French community is presemed by P. J.

Geary, "Saint Helen of Athyra and the Cathedral of Troyes in the Thirteenth Century," jourtwl of Medieval

and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 149-68. Hans Belting discusses the importation of Eastern icons to the West
2 T G. Leporace and E. Mioni, Cpnto Codici Bess(wionei (Venice, 1968), 33-34; Cutler, Ari ltocratic Psa/las,
in Likeness and Presence (Chicago, 1994), 330-48.
115. On the Peribleptos monastery in Constantinople and its library, see Janin , Geogmphie eccftisiastique, III,
IHG. Prato, "La produzione libraria in area greco-orientale nel periodo del regno latino di Costantinopoli pr.l,218-22.
(1204-1261)," Scritl ltmeCivilila 5 (1981),138-47.
21E. Martini, Calalogo di 17lanoscritti gnci esistenti neUe Bihlioterhe ltaliane, I (Milan, 1893), 152. According to
17T he provenance of the ma nuscript is reviewed by E. Mioni, "Un ignoto Dioscoride miniaw (il codice
a note by the librarian Perreau , the manuscript belonged to the Bonvisi family of Lucca. Lorenzo Buonvisi,
greco 194 del Scminario di PadO\'a)," Libri e stampfltori in Plldova (Padua, 1959), 354--57; and by O. Mazal,
a Lucchese merchant of the 15th century, was the founder of the family's fortunes. Members of the family
Bywnl 1md dllS Abrndland (Viellna, 1981), 430.
remained prominent for several centuries. See Dizionario biografico degl! italialli, vol. 15 (Rome, 1972),
18R. Sabbaciini, Le sropnle dei (Odici talini e greri ne ' secoli XIV e XI{ I (Florence, 1905), 46--47. The accounts 289-359.
of the manuscript by Ita~ians in the 15th century arc also discussed by A. Guiliano, "lJ codice di Dioscuride 22 K. Weitzmann and G. Galavaris, The Monas/I:I) of Saint Catl/erine III .Hount Sinni: The IlluminlJted Greeh
a Vienna in una notizia di Giovanni Tortelli," Pam/a del Passato 23 (1968), 52-54. See also pp. 220-21. Manuscripts, 1 (Princeton, 1990), 65-67, fig. 185.
19 Hi,l&ria bywntina, 288. The monastery, nevenheless, sU I-vived the conquest but fell into ruim during the 2'Janin, Geographie ecciesiastiqlle, III, pt. 1,71-72.
following decades: R. Janin, La geograph u' ecclesiaslique de I'EmpiTe byzantin, III, pt. I: Les eglist.) etles 1J1onasteres, 2-1D. Harlfinger et aI., SpecimirUl Sinaiti.ca (Berlin, 1983), 23-24.
2nd ed. (Paris, 1969), 424-25. Sevcral manuscripts were sent to the monastery from Selymbria in 1462-63: 2; K. Weitzmann and H. L. Kessler, The Lol/un Genesi~: British Libra-ry Codex CotiOI! Otlzo BYI (Princeton,
P. Magdalino, "Byzantine Churches in Selymbria," DOP 32 (1978), 314. 1986), frontispiece and text fig. 4. Cf. Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X, posed with his hand resting on what
appears to be a late Gothic illuminated manuscript: W. Kelber, Raphael von Urbino (Stuttgart, 1979), pI. 99.
212
ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 213
1. T H IRTEENT H AN D FO URT EE NT H C ENTU RIES
Besides the Vienna Dioscurides, other illuminated manuscripts also changed owners
For my purposes, the Venetian-led occupation of Constantinople in 1204 would ap after 1204. The early eleventh-century Psalter of Basil Il received Easter tables for the
pear LO be a logical beginning and a meaningful bou ndary between two different histori_ years 1206 to 1225, possibly suggesting a new provenance. Thereafter, it lOO may have
cal epochs. For decades, a rt historians have posited the impact of Byzantine illuminated remained in Constantinople, for a Greek entry notes that in the fifteenth century it be
manuscri pts on Western medieval art, but Hugo Buchthal observed in 1966 that we know longed to a monastery of the Peribleptos, possibly to be associated with the establishment
of on ly one illu minated Greek manuscript that was in the West before 1204. The manu_ ofLhat name in the capital. Cardinal Bessarion acquired the Psalter later in the century. 20
script in question, a kind of "export-ware," is a Psalter, made about 1077 for the church Secondly, that large, handsome Gospel book in Parma, Palatina 5, has Greek entries from
of St. Gereon in Cologne, and, thus, far from I talyl3 As far as I know, Buchthal's general the years 1230 and 1231, indicative perhaps of new ownership. The subsequent history
observation still holds, and I am not aware of any securely documented case of an illumi_ of the m anuscript is not known until it reaches Lucca and the possession of a mercantile
nated Byzantine manuscript in Italy, excluding Sicily, before the thirteenth century.11 family prominent from the fifteenth century. 21 In the case of a copy of the homilies of
What I have found surprising is that for some time after 1204 the situation does not John Chrysostom on Matthew, presently Mt. Sinai cod. 364, ownership, but again not
seem to have changed dramatically Here it is instructive to contrast the western Euro location changed. Equipped with well-known portraits of Constantine IX Monomachos,
pean reception of icons or relics from Constantinople. 15
Lhe empress Zoe, and her sister Theodora, the manuscript was probably given by Con
The Latin possession of Constantinople apparently devastated its manuscript pro stantine to the monastery of St. George of Mangana, which he had founded in Constanti
duction, although Greek manuscripts continued to be produced in outlying regions, as nople. Indeed a thirteenth-century hand has "catalogued" the manuscript as follows:
16
Giancarlo Prato has shown . At the same time, long established collections were dis "hie liber est quintus monasterii beati georgii de mangana in Constantinopoli." 22 Such
persed, and older manuscripts acquired new owners. Thereafter, many manuscripts an entry must date between the initial occupation of the monastery by Latin clergy in
remained in stable collections well into the fifteenth century For example, a thirteenth_ 1207 and the city's return to Greek possession in 1261. 23 What happened to the manu
century Latin note in the famed Dioscurides manuscript in Vienna suggests that its con scrip t during the late Middle Ages is not known, but it probably remained in the East,
text, but not its location, may have shifted after 1204. Yet the manuscript must still have because it was corrected in Greek by a fourteenth-century hand and is next documented
been in Constantinople in the thirteenth century, because, first, it was made for the sixth in sixteenth-century Crete. 21 In sum, the Latin occupation disrupted patronage and li
century Constantinopolitan patron and, second, the manuscript is well attested in that braries. Yet I have found minimal evidence that illustrated Greek manuscripts were as
city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Then it belonged to the monastery of St. yet being taken from Byzantium to Italy, even in the case of a book such as the Sinai
l
John Prodromos in Petra ? and was seen there by the most successful of the Italian manu Chrysostom, which belonged to an institution controlled by the papacy. The exceptions
script
18 hunters, Giovanni Aurispa, during his second voyage to Constantinople in 1421 that I can deduce are worth contemplating, because they suggest the singularity and the
23. According to Doukas, the Prodromos-Petra monastery, as well as the nearby monas significance of these objects in late medieval Italy.
tery of the Chora, was overrun by the Turks at the fall of the cit '9 Mter further My first example concerns the famous Cotton Genesis, that fifth-century Greek
y
vicissitudes, the manuscript was purchased for Emperor Maximilian II in 1569.
manuscript studied in great detail by Professors Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler in
'''As reported in E. Kitzinger, 'The Byzantine Contribution to Western Art of the Twelfth and Thirteenth their 1986 book and represented with Sir Robert Cotton in a contemporary portrait, a
Centuries," DOP 20 (1966), 35. See now A. Cutler, The Aristocratic Psalters in Bywntium (Paris, 1984),89. by then venerable tradition of depicting a man of culture with an illuminated manu
"For Sicily, note the examples of Palermo, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Dep. Museo 4 (see below, notc 30), script. 25 For more than a century now, we have known that this early Byzantine codex or
and the supposed model of the Madrid Scylitzes (above, note 9).
a sister manuscript was the model for the atrium mosaics at the church of San Marco in
15 A useful case study in the importance of Byzantine relics for a French community is presemed by P. J.

Geary, "Saint Helen of Athyra and the Cathedral of Troyes in the Thirteenth Century," jourtwl of Medieval

and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 149-68. Hans Belting discusses the importation of Eastern icons to the West
2 T G. Leporace and E. Mioni, Cpnto Codici Bess(wionei (Venice, 1968), 33-34; Cutler, Ari ltocratic Psa/las,
in Likeness and Presence (Chicago, 1994), 330-48.
115. On the Peribleptos monastery in Constantinople and its library, see Janin , Geogmphie eccftisiastique, III,
IHG. Prato, "La produzione libraria in area greco-orientale nel periodo del regno latino di Costantinopoli pr.l,218-22.
(1204-1261)," Scritl ltmeCivilila 5 (1981),138-47.
21E. Martini, Calalogo di 17lanoscritti gnci esistenti neUe Bihlioterhe ltaliane, I (Milan, 1893), 152. According to
17T he provenance of the ma nuscript is reviewed by E. Mioni, "Un ignoto Dioscoride miniaw (il codice
a note by the librarian Perreau , the manuscript belonged to the Bonvisi family of Lucca. Lorenzo Buonvisi,
greco 194 del Scminario di PadO\'a)," Libri e stampfltori in Plldova (Padua, 1959), 354--57; and by O. Mazal,
a Lucchese merchant of the 15th century, was the founder of the family's fortunes. Members of the family
Bywnl 1md dllS Abrndland (Viellna, 1981), 430.
remained prominent for several centuries. See Dizionario biografico degl! italialli, vol. 15 (Rome, 1972),
18R. Sabbaciini, Le sropnle dei (Odici talini e greri ne ' secoli XIV e XI{ I (Florence, 1905), 46--47. The accounts 289-359.
of the manuscript by Ita~ians in the 15th century arc also discussed by A. Guiliano, "lJ codice di Dioscuride 22 K. Weitzmann and G. Galavaris, The Monas/I:I) of Saint Catl/erine III .Hount Sinni: The IlluminlJted Greeh
a Vienna in una notizia di Giovanni Tortelli," Pam/a del Passato 23 (1968), 52-54. See also pp. 220-21. Manuscripts, 1 (Princeton, 1990), 65-67, fig. 185.
19 Hi,l&ria bywntina, 288. The monastery, nevenheless, sU I-vived the conquest but fell into ruim during the 2'Janin, Geographie ecciesiastiqlle, III, pt. 1,71-72.
following decades: R. Janin, La geograph u' ecclesiaslique de I'EmpiTe byzantin, III, pt. I: Les eglist.) etles 1J1onasteres, 2-1D. Harlfinger et aI., SpecimirUl Sinaiti.ca (Berlin, 1983), 23-24.
2nd ed. (Paris, 1969), 424-25. Sevcral manuscripts were sent to the monastery from Selymbria in 1462-63: 2; K. Weitzmann and H. L. Kessler, The Lol/un Genesi~: British Libra-ry Codex CotiOI! Otlzo BYI (Princeton,
P. Magdalino, "Byzantine Churches in Selymbria," DOP 32 (1978), 314. 1986), frontispiece and text fig. 4. Cf. Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X, posed with his hand resting on what
appears to be a late Gothic illuminated manuscript: W. Kelber, Raphael von Urbino (Stuttgart, 1979), pI. 99.
ROB ERT S. NELSON 21
21 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MANUSCRI PTS

Venice, mosaics that date fro m the I 220s. Weitzma nn and Kessler made considerable nance of Greek manuscripts in southern Italian or Sicilian collections would yield N he r
progress in tidying up the p rovenance of the Colton Genesis. In the process, they were examples of illustrated books imported from Byzantiu m; one promising collection to
able to d emons tra te that this very man uscri pt was the source for the mosaics and that it investigate would be the San Salvatore monastery, the most significan t Greek establish
remained in Ve nice u ntil the second qu arter of the sixteenth century.!l6 The Cotton Gene ment in Sicily.32
sis might have reached Venice as a co nsequence of its domination of a quarter and an But as mentioned above , I prefer to look more closely at the acqu isition of illumi
eighth of the Byzantine Empire or through its e xtensive trading contacts with Egypt, but nated Byzantine manuscripts in central and northern Italy during the fourteenth cen
neither myself nor anyone else can document the manuscript's whereabouts before about tury.33 In that region during the second half of the century, there appear two illustrated
1220. At some unk nown date, it was joined in Venice by a second early Byzantine illus Greek manuscripts, whose subsequent histories and thus historical receptions can be
trated Genesis, the purple manuscrip t in Vienna . As Buchthal explained,27 a note in a traced in some detail. The first is a Gospel lectionary that has belonged to the Biblioteca
northern Italian dialect was added to the manuscript in the fourteenth century, the same Comu nale of Siena since 1786 (cod . X.l Y. l) . Written and illuminated in the late eleventh
period in which details of its miniatures were copied in Venetian miniatures. Thanks to or early twelfth century, the manuscript is decorated with four evangelist portraits and
the work of th ese scholars, we now understa nd how both Genesis manuscripts were used encased in an elaborate enameled cover, which Paul Hetherington has studied. ~> j The
to construct an ancient past for a nou veau riche cityYR manuscript itself and its provenance have recently been analyzed by Giovanna Deren
BesiJes the Cotton Genesis, the only other illuminated Greek manuscript that I know zini.35 The book's provenance is its most important aspect, not only in the present con
to have been in what we now think of as Italy during the thirteenth century is an t.ext. Whereas its decoration is comparatively modest for a period that devoted special
eleventh-century Gospel book in the Vatican, graecus 756. It entered the Vatica n Library attention to the illustration of the Gospel lectionary, the surviving documentation about
in 1583, but we know a bit more about its earlier provenance. Buchthal discovered that the book's acquisition by the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena is without
its miniature of the four evangelists ,vas copied in a Latin manuscript produced in cru parallel.
sader J erusalem during the third quarte r of the twelfth centur\'.~ ~) From the crusader T he transaction took place in Venice on May 28, 1359, and involved on the one side
kingdom, Vat. gr. 756 made its way to Sicily. In he r IIarvard dissertation, Rebecca Corrie Andrea di Grazia, the procurator of the hospital, and on the other, Pietro di Giunta
demonstrates that precise details of one miniature in Vat. gr. 756 were copied in an Torrigiani of Signa. Numerous objects were involved besides the Greek lectionary, the
elaborate Sicilian manuscript of the thirteenth centllry, the Conradin Bible, now in the most important being a major cache of relics that Pietro had brought from Constanti
Walters Art Gallery.:;o I n addition, an add ed folio in the man uscrip t, dated 1294, pertains nople.:!t; Included with the relics was documentation from 1357 as to their authenticity
to the monastery of San Salvatore in Messina. 3 1 Perhaps further research into the prove in the form of testimonials from Latin bishops in Pera Y In that earlier context, the
man uscript was not mentioned , either because the point at issue was the legitimacy of
"" Weitzmann and Kessler, Cot/all Genesis. 3-6. the relics, not the manuscript, or because Pietro did not then own the manuscript. How
"' H. Buchthal. His/m'io 7i-niana : S/uriies in the History of Medineval Secuinr Illustration (London, 19711),47-52.
~8 1bid ., 53-67 .
2DH . Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdo1ll ofj erusalem (Oxford , 1957), 26. ~2 0n collections of Greek manuscripts in Sicily, see H. Buchthal. "A School of Miniature Paintin g in Nor
''''R. Corrie, "The Conradin Bible, Ms. 152, The Walte rs Art Galler y: Manuscript Illumination in a man Sicily," Art of the Mediterranean World, A.D. 100 to 1400 (VVashington , D.C ., 1983), 60, with further refer
Thirteenth-Century Ita lian Atelie:r" (Ph .D. diss ., H arvard University, 1986),2 96-97 . A second illustrated ences. Most of the manuscripts from San Salva tore are now in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Messina , and
BY7.a ntine manuscript, Palermo, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Dep. \>Iuseo 4 , a copy of the Psalms and New at least one of its illuminated volumes was produced outside of Sicily or southern Ital y. It is San Salvatore
'lestame nt illuminated in the Decorative Style, might have bee n in Sicily even before the 13th century, if a 5 1, a rare illustrated Octoechos from the group studied by Annemarie We)'1 Carr and attributed by her to
17th- or 18th-century note can be trus!ed . It sta tes that the manuscript had belongcd to Empress Co nstanza, Cyp rus or Palestine and to the end of the 12th century. See her ByuLnline Illumination, 69-79, 225, and
possibly [he mo ther of empero r Frederick IT , who herself was a nun in the convent of San Salvatore in "Ill umin ated Musical Manuscripts in Byzantium : i\ Note on the Late 1 v.,elfth Century," Gesta 28 (1989),
Palermo. See: :-'1artini, Catniogo di manoscritti greci, I, 142; O. Demus, The MOS(liC5 of Nurman Sicily (New York, 41-52. An 11 th-century copy of the homilies of Gregory Nazia nzc nus , first d ocumented in Constantino ple
1950), 410 ; Cutler, Aristocralir. P,aill:'-s, 61. The manuscript properly belongs to that extensive group of later in the late 14th century and later at the San SalYaLOre monastery, is now in Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Canon . gr.
12th-ce ntury manuscripts , ,""se:mbled by Anne marie Weyl Carr, B)lwntinl' Illumination, 19,273-74. Because 74: 1. Hutter, Corpus der byumtinisrhen Miniatu1'Imhanliscrijten, 3.1 (Stuttgart, 1982), 77. It has only minimal
the subgroup to which th e Palermo manuscripts belongs can be generally localized in Cyprus or Palestine , decoratio n . Also in Oxford are manuscripts of southern Italian origin that once were in the mo nastery: ibid .,
specifically Jerusalem (ibid., 20-2R), one wonders if this manuscript, like Vat. gr. 756, might also have come 110, Ill , 154.
from the Hoi\' Land. But there is more than a little supposition here. In particular, the: 18th-century entry ~3 In addition to the man uscripts discu ssed below, I would also note that the illustrated Nicander in Paris,
has not inspired confidence in earlier authors: cf. Demus , Mosaics. Bib!. Na t. suppl. gr. 247 , has brief Latin entries by a 14th-ce ntury Italian hand , according to H. Omont,
~ 1 R. Devree:sse, BibLiothewe Apostoliwe ~Y..tiwlWe: Codires Vaticoni gm.eci, III (Vatican, 1950), 274. The Latin ,\tiT/iatures des !)ln~ anciens ma'lluscnls grecs de La Bibliotheque Na lionale dll VIe au XH~ siecle (Paris, 1929), 34. Such
script on this folio (fol. I v) and another at the end (rol. 30 1) is written vert ically, meaning that the folios have 110tes, of course, may or may not indicate that the manuscript was then in Italy.
been turned 90 degrees and inse rted . Thus th e folios, strictl y spea king, do not, by themselves, establish the ~4 P. Hetherington , "Byzantine Enamels on a Ve netian Book-cover," CahAn)) 27 (1978), 117-45.
manu script in Messina in the late 13th centu ry, contra ry to what has been inferred from J)cvreesse's d escrip '\ ~' See G. Derenzini , "Esame paleografico del codice X.IV.I della Biblioteca Comunale degli Intro nati e
tion. Th e folios should probably be associa ted with the rebindi ng of the ma nuscript in 15R3. In that year, contributo documentale alia storia del '-tesoro' dello Spedale cii Santa Maria della Scala," Annali della Faroita
Francesco Akkidas of Messina gave this and three other G reek manuscripts to Pope Gregory XlI 1. T he di /.eUcre e FiLosofia dell'Universila di SifllfL 8 (1987), 59-74 . In rega rd to the acquisition of this manuscript, she
d onati on is commemorated by a promin ent Greek inscriptio n on the front and back covers. On Akkidas a nd corrects man y details of previous accounts, all of which now must he approached with caution. She also has
his manuscripts, see P. Canan, U s Vaticani graeci, J487-1962: notes et documents pour l'llistoire d'lInfon ds d(: mall US written "II codice X.IV.I della Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati di Siena ," Milion I (1988), 307-25.
crits de La Bihliotlu?que Vaticane, S r 284 (Vatican, 1979), 173-91. Canan attributes the binding to Messina ;' [ext in Dere nzini, "Esame," 59-69.
(p. 178). ' 7Ibid.,69-72
ROB ERT S. NELSON 21
21 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MANUSCRI PTS

Venice, mosaics that date fro m the I 220s. Weitzma nn and Kessler made considerable nance of Greek manuscripts in southern Italian or Sicilian collections would yield N he r
progress in tidying up the p rovenance of the Colton Genesis. In the process, they were examples of illustrated books imported from Byzantiu m; one promising collection to
able to d emons tra te that this very man uscri pt was the source for the mosaics and that it investigate would be the San Salvatore monastery, the most significan t Greek establish
remained in Ve nice u ntil the second qu arter of the sixteenth century.!l6 The Cotton Gene ment in Sicily.32
sis might have reached Venice as a co nsequence of its domination of a quarter and an But as mentioned above , I prefer to look more closely at the acqu isition of illumi
eighth of the Byzantine Empire or through its e xtensive trading contacts with Egypt, but nated Byzantine manuscripts in central and northern Italy during the fourteenth cen
neither myself nor anyone else can document the manuscript's whereabouts before about tury.33 In that region during the second half of the century, there appear two illustrated
1220. At some unk nown date, it was joined in Venice by a second early Byzantine illus Greek manuscripts, whose subsequent histories and thus historical receptions can be
trated Genesis, the purple manuscrip t in Vienna . As Buchthal explained,27 a note in a traced in some detail. The first is a Gospel lectionary that has belonged to the Biblioteca
northern Italian dialect was added to the manuscript in the fourteenth century, the same Comu nale of Siena since 1786 (cod . X.l Y. l) . Written and illuminated in the late eleventh
period in which details of its miniatures were copied in Venetian miniatures. Thanks to or early twelfth century, the manuscript is decorated with four evangelist portraits and
the work of th ese scholars, we now understa nd how both Genesis manuscripts were used encased in an elaborate enameled cover, which Paul Hetherington has studied. ~> j The
to construct an ancient past for a nou veau riche cityYR manuscript itself and its provenance have recently been analyzed by Giovanna Deren
BesiJes the Cotton Genesis, the only other illuminated Greek manuscript that I know zini.35 The book's provenance is its most important aspect, not only in the present con
to have been in what we now think of as Italy during the thirteenth century is an t.ext. Whereas its decoration is comparatively modest for a period that devoted special
eleventh-century Gospel book in the Vatican, graecus 756. It entered the Vatica n Library attention to the illustration of the Gospel lectionary, the surviving documentation about
in 1583, but we know a bit more about its earlier provenance. Buchthal discovered that the book's acquisition by the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena is without
its miniature of the four evangelists ,vas copied in a Latin manuscript produced in cru parallel.
sader J erusalem during the third quarte r of the twelfth centur\'.~ ~) From the crusader T he transaction took place in Venice on May 28, 1359, and involved on the one side
kingdom, Vat. gr. 756 made its way to Sicily. In he r IIarvard dissertation, Rebecca Corrie Andrea di Grazia, the procurator of the hospital, and on the other, Pietro di Giunta
demonstrates that precise details of one miniature in Vat. gr. 756 were copied in an Torrigiani of Signa. Numerous objects were involved besides the Greek lectionary, the
elaborate Sicilian manuscript of the thirteenth centllry, the Conradin Bible, now in the most important being a major cache of relics that Pietro had brought from Constanti
Walters Art Gallery.:;o I n addition, an add ed folio in the man uscrip t, dated 1294, pertains nople.:!t; Included with the relics was documentation from 1357 as to their authenticity
to the monastery of San Salvatore in Messina. 3 1 Perhaps further research into the prove in the form of testimonials from Latin bishops in Pera Y In that earlier context, the
man uscript was not mentioned , either because the point at issue was the legitimacy of
"" Weitzmann and Kessler, Cot/all Genesis. 3-6. the relics, not the manuscript, or because Pietro did not then own the manuscript. How
"' H. Buchthal. His/m'io 7i-niana : S/uriies in the History of Medineval Secuinr Illustration (London, 19711),47-52.
~8 1bid ., 53-67 .
2DH . Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdo1ll ofj erusalem (Oxford , 1957), 26. ~2 0n collections of Greek manuscripts in Sicily, see H. Buchthal. "A School of Miniature Paintin g in Nor
''''R. Corrie, "The Conradin Bible, Ms. 152, The Walte rs Art Galler y: Manuscript Illumination in a man Sicily," Art of the Mediterranean World, A.D. 100 to 1400 (VVashington , D.C ., 1983), 60, with further refer
Thirteenth-Century Ita lian Atelie:r" (Ph .D. diss ., H arvard University, 1986),2 96-97 . A second illustrated ences. Most of the manuscripts from San Salva tore are now in the Biblioteca Universitaria of Messina , and
BY7.a ntine manuscript, Palermo, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Dep. \>Iuseo 4 , a copy of the Psalms and New at least one of its illuminated volumes was produced outside of Sicily or southern Ital y. It is San Salvatore
'lestame nt illuminated in the Decorative Style, might have bee n in Sicily even before the 13th century, if a 5 1, a rare illustrated Octoechos from the group studied by Annemarie We)'1 Carr and attributed by her to
17th- or 18th-century note can be trus!ed . It sta tes that the manuscript had belongcd to Empress Co nstanza, Cyp rus or Palestine and to the end of the 12th century. See her ByuLnline Illumination, 69-79, 225, and
possibly [he mo ther of empero r Frederick IT , who herself was a nun in the convent of San Salvatore in "Ill umin ated Musical Manuscripts in Byzantium : i\ Note on the Late 1 v.,elfth Century," Gesta 28 (1989),
Palermo. See: :-'1artini, Catniogo di manoscritti greci, I, 142; O. Demus, The MOS(liC5 of Nurman Sicily (New York, 41-52. An 11 th-century copy of the homilies of Gregory Nazia nzc nus , first d ocumented in Constantino ple
1950), 410 ; Cutler, Aristocralir. P,aill:'-s, 61. The manuscript properly belongs to that extensive group of later in the late 14th century and later at the San SalYaLOre monastery, is now in Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Canon . gr.
12th-ce ntury manuscripts , ,""se:mbled by Anne marie Weyl Carr, B)lwntinl' Illumination, 19,273-74. Because 74: 1. Hutter, Corpus der byumtinisrhen Miniatu1'Imhanliscrijten, 3.1 (Stuttgart, 1982), 77. It has only minimal
the subgroup to which th e Palermo manuscripts belongs can be generally localized in Cyprus or Palestine , decoratio n . Also in Oxford are manuscripts of southern Italian origin that once were in the mo nastery: ibid .,
specifically Jerusalem (ibid., 20-2R), one wonders if this manuscript, like Vat. gr. 756, might also have come 110, Ill , 154.
from the Hoi\' Land. But there is more than a little supposition here. In particular, the: 18th-century entry ~3 In addition to the man uscripts discu ssed below, I would also note that the illustrated Nicander in Paris,
has not inspired confidence in earlier authors: cf. Demus , Mosaics. Bib!. Na t. suppl. gr. 247 , has brief Latin entries by a 14th-ce ntury Italian hand , according to H. Omont,
~ 1 R. Devree:sse, BibLiothewe Apostoliwe ~Y..tiwlWe: Codires Vaticoni gm.eci, III (Vatican, 1950), 274. The Latin ,\tiT/iatures des !)ln~ anciens ma'lluscnls grecs de La Bibliotheque Na lionale dll VIe au XH~ siecle (Paris, 1929), 34. Such
script on this folio (fol. I v) and another at the end (rol. 30 1) is written vert ically, meaning that the folios have 110tes, of course, may or may not indicate that the manuscript was then in Italy.
been turned 90 degrees and inse rted . Thus th e folios, strictl y spea king, do not, by themselves, establish the ~4 P. Hetherington , "Byzantine Enamels on a Ve netian Book-cover," CahAn)) 27 (1978), 117-45.
manu script in Messina in the late 13th centu ry, contra ry to what has been inferred from J)cvreesse's d escrip '\ ~' See G. Derenzini , "Esame paleografico del codice X.IV.I della Biblioteca Comunale degli Intro nati e
tion. Th e folios should probably be associa ted with the rebindi ng of the ma nuscript in 15R3. In that year, contributo documentale alia storia del '-tesoro' dello Spedale cii Santa Maria della Scala," Annali della Faroita
Francesco Akkidas of Messina gave this and three other G reek manuscripts to Pope Gregory XlI 1. T he di /.eUcre e FiLosofia dell'Universila di SifllfL 8 (1987), 59-74 . In rega rd to the acquisition of this manuscript, she
d onati on is commemorated by a promin ent Greek inscriptio n on the front and back covers. On Akkidas a nd corrects man y details of previous accounts, all of which now must he approached with caution. She also has
his manuscripts, see P. Canan, U s Vaticani graeci, J487-1962: notes et documents pour l'llistoire d'lInfon ds d(: mall US written "II codice X.IV.I della Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati di Siena ," Milion I (1988), 307-25.
crits de La Bihliotlu?que Vaticane, S r 284 (Vatican, 1979), 173-91. Canan attributes the binding to Messina ;' [ext in Dere nzini, "Esame," 59-69.
(p. 178). ' 7Ibid.,69-72
217
ROBERT S. NELSON
216 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MAN USCR fPTS

the object d escribed from Constantinople to Venice, he would h ave brought it to a cen ter
ever, given lhat the Siena lectionary was the product of a Co nstantjnopoLitan scriptorium
that had lo ng ap preciated wh at we call the "decorative arts" of Byza ntium .
and that such books we re not especially common in haly even by the later fourteenth Many of th ese objects had a secon d life in Venice, as they were incorporated into local
century, it is reaso nable to su ppose that Pietro did possess the m an uscript and that he riles and institutio ns. In her 1987 Harvard dissertation, Ranee Katze nstein, for exanlple ,
brought the relics and the ma nuscript with its ornate cover to Venice so metime between
explores the fou r teen th-century reuse of so me of the most fam ous Byzantine enameled
1357 and ) 3 5 9. j~ book cove rs in existence, the covers that fo rmerly protected a set of three Latin service
At the macrocosmic level, these transactions exem plify econom ic patte rns that pre books. These decorated manuscripts were made for the altar of the church of San Marco
vailed across the Med iterranean during the fourteenth century. Firstly, Pietro di Giunta in the second qua r ter of the fourteenth ce ntury. Ka tzenstein is able to show that the
Torrigiani had obtained by some means Byzanti ne objects, which he imported from Con manuscripts, each of a different size, were made to fit the covers, n ot vice versa, and

stantino ple to Venice and then resold, just as Italian merchants bought other commodi
further she associate s the project with Doge Andrea Dandolo's refashio ning of the Pala

ties in Con stantinople for resale in Ven ice at a profit. Indeed, the economic historians d'Oro and its earlier Byzantine enamels between 1343 and 1345.'13 Give n th is evide nt

Angeliki Laiou and Nicolas Oikonomides have shown how the Italians controlled the
appreciation of the covers of deluxe Byzantine manuscripts, if not necessarily their con

most p rofi tab le lo ng-d istance trade in the eastern Mediterranean d uring the period.:l !!
tents-we kn ow nothing about the Greek manuscripts that once filled these covers-it

Secondly, the details of these exchanges were set down in legal documents and duly
is surprising that th e Sienese also wanted to obtain the lectionary and the important relics

witnessed, just like the numerous transactions that fill the account books ofItalian notar
for their hospital. And the terms ofTered Pietro eli G iunta Torrigiani were so generous as

ies .40 Thus these objects were, in fact, little different from other commodities; hence the
real need to avoid the appearance of simony, which is precisely th is com modifICation of to overcome resistances of almost any sort.44
T he second illustrated Greek manuscript that also most likely came to Italy in th e
the holy. Thirdly, we see Venice serving as the port of entry for a Greek manuscript into
four teenth century is the famous Menologium of Basilll (Vat. gr. 1613). Its first Italian
Italy and Euro pe. Venice would continue to play th at role for se ve ral centuries. In the owne r was a minor Genoese lawyer and diplomat, one Bartolomeo di Jacopo, who identi
sixteenth century, Franr;ois I, for example, obtained many Greek manuscripts through fied himself in a prayer that he inscribed at the beginning of the manuscript. This prayer
his ambassador in Venice, and the Cotton Genesis, we ha ve just noted, left Venice for and Bartolomeo'S ownership of the manuscript has recently been studied in detail by
England in the Same period. 41 Leandro Ventura. 4 :' Bartolomeo entered the service of his city, Genoa, in 1360 and over
Finally, it is important to entertain the possibility that the Siena lectionary was valued a lo ng and successful career was its ambassador in Avignon, Florence, Castile, and Milan.
in Italy not so much for its G reek text or for its Byzantine evan gelist portraits, but for its In 1365, he was the consul of the Genoese colony in Caffa,16 and Ventura suggests that
enameled cover. After aU, this codex is not traveling in the com pan y of other books, but Bartolomeo may have purchased the Menologium in ( :onstantinople during transit to
with relics and with objects of high material cost. As usual in such matters , medieval
Crimea. Thanks to inventories made after Bartolomeo'S death in 1389, we know the
aesth etics and economics would have placed a higher value on materials than on work
contents of the libraries at his residences in Genoa and Pavia, the Menologium most
manship , and thus the cover would have been p refe r red over the miniatures inside.
likely being kept at the latter. Ventura speculates that the manuscript may h ave subse
Indeed, Pietro di Giunta Torrigiani is said to offer "unum librum Evangcliorum in lingua 47

Greca fulcitu m auro et arge nto cum smaltis." 42 If, as I belie\"e likely, Pietro had brought que ntly passed to the Visconti and Sforza collections.
The history that Ventura reconstructs from Bartolomeo'S prayer is at odds with what
has bee n obtained from a note written on folio 1r in the late sixteenth cen wry.4!! Prece
38Although not an expert on Byzantine and Venetia n metalwork , I under~tand the production history of
the Siena lectionary as foJlow~: Writtell an d uecorated in Constantinople in the eleven th century, it received
a n ~w cover in the Palaeologan period , perhaps the 14th century, made of reused Byzanti ne enamels. For 13R. A. Katzenstein , "Three Liturgical Manu :, cripts from San Marco: Art and Patrollage in Mid-TrecenlO
his part, Hetherington (" Enamels,"' 127) accepts the enamels as BYl.:a ntine, but believes that ule vine pattern
Venice" (Ph .0. diss., Harva rd U niversilY, 1987), ~::i2-52.
in th e fIeld of the cover is not Byz.antine, but by7.antinizing and best localized in Venice as early as the first :, L. Banchi thought the price paiu was absurdly high: H . W. yan Os, Vecchiella and the Sacrist), of [h e Siello
halfof the 13 th century. He lOO thinks that the manuscript was in Constantinople in l:l 57, and thus he has Hospital ChuTch ('s Gravenhagt" 1974),89 n . 13. What Pietro gained for his famil y can be contexlualized
the manuscript going from Venice to Conslantinople (from which it would have come somet.ime earlier), through the wage and priu's reported in R . A. Goldthwaite , The Buildi!ig of Renaissance Florel7ce (Baltimore,
a nd then being taken back to Venice by Pie tro. Details of Hetherington's account have to be modihed in
light of Dere m.ini's stud y, but his basic premises should also be reformulated in my opinion. Trade in deluxe 1980).
" 'L. Ventura , "A proposito delle trasmigrazioni del Mlmologio I/-i. BrJ.Silio II (cod ice vaticano greco 1613),"
Greek manuscripts from east to west was quite rare in the 13th century, as I have tried to show, and is Acwdernie e Bihlioteche d'Ita.lir. 55 (1989), 3!J-;)9. See also th e e ntry, "Bartolomeo di 1acopo," by G. Pistarino in
without precedent in the other direction. Dizionnno biogrlljiw deg1i itll /iani, vol. 6 (Rome, 1964),727-28, with further references. Ventura's article was
"'A. E. Laiou-TholTladakis, "The Byza ntine Economy in the Mediterranean Trade System: Thirteenth brought to my attention by 1hor Sevcenko, and I am most grateful. The definitive studies on the Me nolog6
Fifteenth Centuries ," DOP 34-35 (J 980-81), 177-222 ; N. Oikonomides, Hommes d'affaiTl's grer.s et trains Ii Con ium remain the classic a.rticles of Prof. Svecenko , "The Illuminators of the Menologium of Basil II," DOl' I
stantinople (XlI/e-XVe .Iiecies) (Montreal, 1979), 83- 86.
(1962), 243-76, and "On Pantoleon the Painter," JOB 21 (1972), 241-50.
.oFor this period, see the materials assembl ed in the essays of Michel Balard and Angeliki E. Laiou in 46 He duly appears in the list of consuls tabulated by M. Balard, La. Romallie gbw~~e. II (Rome, 1978), 902.
Balard et aI., Les italiens Ii Byzance (Pari~, J 987).
41 See the articles of Nigel Wilson, Jean 1rigoin, and Paul Canart, in Venezia, Centro di mediazione 1m Oriente
"Ventura, "Trasmigrazioni," 36-37.
'. C. Giannelli, Codices Vaficrmi Graeci: Codices 1485-1683 (Vatican, 1950),277 . 1 note that the folio numbers
e Occl!.len te (as in note 10), 381-44l.
given by Ventura and Giannelli do no t agree. 1 report the form er's.
'"Derez.ini, "Esame ," 62 .
217
ROBERT S. NELSON
216 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MAN USCR fPTS

the object d escribed from Constantinople to Venice, he would h ave brought it to a cen ter
ever, given lhat the Siena lectionary was the product of a Co nstantjnopoLitan scriptorium
that had lo ng ap preciated wh at we call the "decorative arts" of Byza ntium .
and that such books we re not especially common in haly even by the later fourteenth Many of th ese objects had a secon d life in Venice, as they were incorporated into local
century, it is reaso nable to su ppose that Pietro did possess the m an uscript and that he riles and institutio ns. In her 1987 Harvard dissertation, Ranee Katze nstein, for exanlple ,
brought the relics and the ma nuscript with its ornate cover to Venice so metime between
explores the fou r teen th-century reuse of so me of the most fam ous Byzantine enameled
1357 and ) 3 5 9. j~ book cove rs in existence, the covers that fo rmerly protected a set of three Latin service
At the macrocosmic level, these transactions exem plify econom ic patte rns that pre books. These decorated manuscripts were made for the altar of the church of San Marco
vailed across the Med iterranean during the fourteenth century. Firstly, Pietro di Giunta in the second qua r ter of the fourteenth ce ntury. Ka tzenstein is able to show that the
Torrigiani had obtained by some means Byzanti ne objects, which he imported from Con manuscripts, each of a different size, were made to fit the covers, n ot vice versa, and

stantino ple to Venice and then resold, just as Italian merchants bought other commodi
further she associate s the project with Doge Andrea Dandolo's refashio ning of the Pala

ties in Con stantinople for resale in Ven ice at a profit. Indeed, the economic historians d'Oro and its earlier Byzantine enamels between 1343 and 1345.'13 Give n th is evide nt

Angeliki Laiou and Nicolas Oikonomides have shown how the Italians controlled the
appreciation of the covers of deluxe Byzantine manuscripts, if not necessarily their con

most p rofi tab le lo ng-d istance trade in the eastern Mediterranean d uring the period.:l !!
tents-we kn ow nothing about the Greek manuscripts that once filled these covers-it

Secondly, the details of these exchanges were set down in legal documents and duly
is surprising that th e Sienese also wanted to obtain the lectionary and the important relics

witnessed, just like the numerous transactions that fill the account books ofItalian notar
for their hospital. And the terms ofTered Pietro eli G iunta Torrigiani were so generous as

ies .40 Thus these objects were, in fact, little different from other commodities; hence the
real need to avoid the appearance of simony, which is precisely th is com modifICation of to overcome resistances of almost any sort.44
T he second illustrated Greek manuscript that also most likely came to Italy in th e
the holy. Thirdly, we see Venice serving as the port of entry for a Greek manuscript into
four teenth century is the famous Menologium of Basilll (Vat. gr. 1613). Its first Italian
Italy and Euro pe. Venice would continue to play th at role for se ve ral centuries. In the owne r was a minor Genoese lawyer and diplomat, one Bartolomeo di Jacopo, who identi
sixteenth century, Franr;ois I, for example, obtained many Greek manuscripts through fied himself in a prayer that he inscribed at the beginning of the manuscript. This prayer
his ambassador in Venice, and the Cotton Genesis, we ha ve just noted, left Venice for and Bartolomeo'S ownership of the manuscript has recently been studied in detail by
England in the Same period. 41 Leandro Ventura. 4 :' Bartolomeo entered the service of his city, Genoa, in 1360 and over
Finally, it is important to entertain the possibility that the Siena lectionary was valued a lo ng and successful career was its ambassador in Avignon, Florence, Castile, and Milan.
in Italy not so much for its G reek text or for its Byzantine evan gelist portraits, but for its In 1365, he was the consul of the Genoese colony in Caffa,16 and Ventura suggests that
enameled cover. After aU, this codex is not traveling in the com pan y of other books, but Bartolomeo may have purchased the Menologium in ( :onstantinople during transit to
with relics and with objects of high material cost. As usual in such matters , medieval
Crimea. Thanks to inventories made after Bartolomeo'S death in 1389, we know the
aesth etics and economics would have placed a higher value on materials than on work
contents of the libraries at his residences in Genoa and Pavia, the Menologium most
manship , and thus the cover would have been p refe r red over the miniatures inside.
likely being kept at the latter. Ventura speculates that the manuscript may h ave subse
Indeed, Pietro di Giunta Torrigiani is said to offer "unum librum Evangcliorum in lingua 47

Greca fulcitu m auro et arge nto cum smaltis." 42 If, as I belie\"e likely, Pietro had brought que ntly passed to the Visconti and Sforza collections.
The history that Ventura reconstructs from Bartolomeo'S prayer is at odds with what
has bee n obtained from a note written on folio 1r in the late sixteenth cen wry.4!! Prece
38Although not an expert on Byzantine and Venetia n metalwork , I under~tand the production history of
the Siena lectionary as foJlow~: Writtell an d uecorated in Constantinople in the eleven th century, it received
a n ~w cover in the Palaeologan period , perhaps the 14th century, made of reused Byzanti ne enamels. For 13R. A. Katzenstein , "Three Liturgical Manu :, cripts from San Marco: Art and Patrollage in Mid-TrecenlO
his part, Hetherington (" Enamels,"' 127) accepts the enamels as BYl.:a ntine, but believes that ule vine pattern
Venice" (Ph .0. diss., Harva rd U niversilY, 1987), ~::i2-52.
in th e fIeld of the cover is not Byz.antine, but by7.antinizing and best localized in Venice as early as the first :, L. Banchi thought the price paiu was absurdly high: H . W. yan Os, Vecchiella and the Sacrist), of [h e Siello
halfof the 13 th century. He lOO thinks that the manuscript was in Constantinople in l:l 57, and thus he has Hospital ChuTch ('s Gravenhagt" 1974),89 n . 13. What Pietro gained for his famil y can be contexlualized
the manuscript going from Venice to Conslantinople (from which it would have come somet.ime earlier), through the wage and priu's reported in R . A. Goldthwaite , The Buildi!ig of Renaissance Florel7ce (Baltimore,
a nd then being taken back to Venice by Pie tro. Details of Hetherington's account have to be modihed in
light of Dere m.ini's stud y, but his basic premises should also be reformulated in my opinion. Trade in deluxe 1980).
" 'L. Ventura , "A proposito delle trasmigrazioni del Mlmologio I/-i. BrJ.Silio II (cod ice vaticano greco 1613),"
Greek manuscripts from east to west was quite rare in the 13th century, as I have tried to show, and is Acwdernie e Bihlioteche d'Ita.lir. 55 (1989), 3!J-;)9. See also th e e ntry, "Bartolomeo di 1acopo," by G. Pistarino in
without precedent in the other direction. Dizionnno biogrlljiw deg1i itll /iani, vol. 6 (Rome, 1964),727-28, with further references. Ventura's article was
"'A. E. Laiou-TholTladakis, "The Byza ntine Economy in the Mediterranean Trade System: Thirteenth brought to my attention by 1hor Sevcenko, and I am most grateful. The definitive studies on the Me nolog6
Fifteenth Centuries ," DOP 34-35 (J 980-81), 177-222 ; N. Oikonomides, Hommes d'affaiTl's grer.s et trains Ii Con ium remain the classic a.rticles of Prof. Svecenko , "The Illuminators of the Menologium of Basil II," DOl' I
stantinople (XlI/e-XVe .Iiecies) (Montreal, 1979), 83- 86.
(1962), 243-76, and "On Pantoleon the Painter," JOB 21 (1972), 241-50.
.oFor this period, see the materials assembl ed in the essays of Michel Balard and Angeliki E. Laiou in 46 He duly appears in the list of consuls tabulated by M. Balard, La. Romallie gbw~~e. II (Rome, 1978), 902.
Balard et aI., Les italiens Ii Byzance (Pari~, J 987).
41 See the articles of Nigel Wilson, Jean 1rigoin, and Paul Canart, in Venezia, Centro di mediazione 1m Oriente
"Ventura, "Trasmigrazioni," 36-37.
'. C. Giannelli, Codices Vaficrmi Graeci: Codices 1485-1683 (Vatican, 1950),277 . 1 note that the folio numbers
e Occl!.len te (as in note 10), 381-44l.
given by Ventura and Giannelli do no t agree. 1 report the form er's.
'"Derez.ini, "Esame ," 62 .
21 8 ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 2 19

de nce has , he retofore, been accorded the second nO lice.49 According lo it, the manuscript
left behi nd. Two particular manuscripts, one classical a nd the orher biblical, sugges t the
was sem to Ludovico Sforza , d uke of Milan , from Constantino ple "co n molta solennita."
poten tials an d the pitfalls ofth is material for my narrative .
Ludovico gave it Lo a favorite associate, Giovan ni Battista Sfondrato, who, it is stated,
The for mer, p resently Va t. Urb. gr. 82, is a grand codex of the Geogral)hy of Ptolemy
was the father of Fra ncesco Sfo ndra to, and the grandta ther of Niccolo Sfo nd rato "hora
furnished with th e requisite maps and wl;tcen about a century earlier in Constanti
cardinale." Cardinal Sfond rato or his librarian is thu s the au thor orthe e ntry, wh ich must
nople .oJ Allhough th e Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci claims that the hu
have been wri tten between 1583, when he assumed tha t offi ce, and 1590, when he be
ma nist Palla Strozzi (d. 1462 ) sen t to Greece for the man uscript,54 Strozzi hi mself states
came Pope Gregory Xly' 50 Such a no te d efin es th e man uscrip t as a family heirloom and,
olherwise in his will. Leaving the man uscripl to his sons , he instructs them not to alienate
al the sam e time, embellishes its hislor y at the Sforza co url, for the ulti ma te be nefit,
it, because this was the book, wh ich Manuel Chrysoloras, "Greek o r Co nstantinople," had
nalurally, of the cardi nal and his fam ily. At the death of Gregory Xl V, the ma nuscript
brought when he came to Florence in 1397. 55 In spite of his wishes, the book rather
passed to th e papal nephew and cardi nal, Paolo Emilio Sfond ra to. In 1615, he finally
quickly fou nd its way to the vast libra ry being asse mbled by Feder igo da Montefeltro (d.
took th e Mcnologiu m o ut of the fa mily's possession, by giving it to Pope Pa ul V Borghese,
1482), co un t and later du ke of U rbino. From there, the book passed with tl1e rest of the
who p romptly p laced it in [he Vati can Library, thereby end ing its generational migration.
Urbino ma nuscripts to the Vatican Library in the seven teen th centu ry. Such a m an uscrip l
T he ma n uscri p t's possession by the Slondrato family in the sixteenth century and its
is th us well docu men ted and also well studied , than ks to a three-volu me publication
subsequent history in th e Vatican during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries be of 1932.',l;
longs to a pattern of historical reception that differed ma r ked ly from the la tel- Middle
In con trast, the second ma nuscript, owned by Palla Slrozzi an d said by him to have
Ages. T hu s by th e sixteen th century, an illustrated Byza n tine manuscript had become an
belonged to Ch rysolo ras, is a co p y of the fou r Gospels, and it re mai ns u niden lified. In
obj ect of prestige in an eco nomy of gift-giving at princely and ecclesiastical courts and,
bis will of 1462, Palla Strozzi leaves a Greek Gospel book, together with other man u
in the follow ing century, an ho nored add ition to a major Eu ropean library, whereupon
scrip ts, mostly Greek, to th e monaster y of San Gius tina in Pad uCl.j7 T he Gospel book is
it entered the realm of scholarly e xchange in which it exis ts to the present. What made
nOled in th e in ventory ofStrozzi's collection of 143 1 and is later d esc ribed in the will as
possible th ese shifts in status from Ba rtolomeo eli J acopo to Lodovico Sforza and to the
a "liu..Ie volu me" wri lle n wiLh th e most beautiful Gree k letters on th e fin est pa rch ment
Sfondrati ia mily is lhe risi ng preslige of ill ustrated Greek manuscriplS du ring the quat
trocento, th e period to which I now tu rn . and bound with boards covered with a very old and worn gold fabri c. :;~ T he description
wou ld appear to be of a Gospel book of smaller dimensions, as private manuscripts were
wa nt to be, and bou nd with expensive fabric ove r wood , a techn ique seen in a Grottafer
2. 1400-145 0
rata manuscript of the writings of a Chrysoloras contem porary, Emperor Man uel II,
I n our world, histories are often subd ivid ed by ce nturies, as if author and aud ience, to be discu ssed shortly. Diller reasonably conclu des that it is a manuscript "de luxe ."59
like the ancie nt Py111agoreans , are persuaded and reassu red by the powe r of n umbers to Regrettably nothing furth er can be said about this manu script or about an "evangclia"
reveal fun damen tal lr uths. Skepticism about such neat and tidy bundles of time is war that was owned by the contemporary h umanist Guarino Guarini (d . 1460).60
ranted in all instances. Yet it does so happen that the years aroun d 1400 witnessed a Guarino was also a stu den t of Chrysoloras a nd had transl ated his gra mmar boo k. H e
fu ndame ntal change in the Ital ian apprecia tion of Greek culture and the man uscripts followed his men to r bac k to Constantinople and lived in his household for five years.
th at tra ns mitted it, for in 1397, Manuel Chrysoloras came from Consla ntinople to teach Over the years, Gu a rino amassed a collection of Greek manuscri p ts, wh ich are known
Greek in n ore nce . Staying only th ree years, a brief interlude in a caree r pri marily spent
in th e d iplomatic service of Byzantium,SI this visiting professor had a profound impact 0:< Illustrations in J Fisch er. Claudii Ptolemalti r;eogmphiae: Codex U,billos Graecu5 82, 3 vols. (Leiden , 1932).
;"v. da Bisticci , Le i'ite, ed. Aulo Greco, II (Flore nce, 1976), 140.
upon his studen ts and u pon the course of Italian humanism. Not only did he write the
5Sv. Fanelli, "llibri de Messe r Palla di Nofri Strou.i (1372-1462)," CU/lViVl Il1ll (1949),65. See also A. Dille r,
d efinit ive and "best-selli ng" te xtbook for the study of Greek and quickly attracted de
"The Greek Cod ices of Palla Strozzi and Gua rino Veronese ," J W(l rz, 24 (1961) , 3 16. More recent literature is
voted sludents,51 but he also brought to Flo rence Greek man uscripts, some of which he
reported in P. Eleutcri and P. Canart, Scrittllra greca nell 'ulIwllesirno it(Jlimw (Milan, 1991), 30-31.
5HAs in note 53. Most recently see O. A. W. Dilke, in J. B. H arley and D. Woodward, The Histal)' of Cartogm

'9E.g., most recently Cologne. Erzbish6flichen Di6zesa nmuseurn . Biblioteca Apostolica Valicana: Liturgie und I)") (Chicago, 1987), 269-70; N. M. Swerdlow, "Th e Recover >' of th e Exact Scie nces of An tiquity: Mathe mat
Andacht illl Mit/etulter (Stuttgart, 1992), 114. ics, As tronomy, Geograph y," in Rome Relia m , ed. Anthon y C ra fLOn (Washington, D.C., 1993), 158; A. E.
"i>Vemula. "Trasmigrazio ni," 3t-l. aiou , "On Political Geographv: The Black Sea of Pachymcres,"' in The Making of Bywutine History: Strulie.1
51 That career is I-eviewed by G. T De nnis , The Letters of 1I'[nnuel /J Polaeol()glls (Was hington, 197 7), xxxv Dedicated to Donald M. Nirol, ed. R. Bea ton and C. Roueche (Aldershot, Hampshire , 1993),95.
XXX VII. 57G . Fiocco, "La casa di Palla Strozzi ," AUi della Accadenria Nazianall: dfi Lillc(~, ser. 8: Me m01ie, C/asse di
n Srienu Morali, Storiche e Filologirhe 5 (1 954). 376; idem, "La biblioteca di Palla Strozzi," Studi di hibliogmfia. e di
'2 0 Chrysoloras' visit, see R. Weiss, "Gli inizi dello studio del greco a Firenze," in his Medieval and
HU1Ilanist Greek: Collected Essays (Pad ua , 1977), 227-54: an d N. G. Wilson. Fr01ll Byzantiu?Il to Italy: Greek Studies stoTio. in onaTe di 'J.hmrrwm de M(l rillL.l, II (Vatican, 1964),297 .
in the itrilinn Remlis.wnrl' (BaILirnore, 1992), 8-12. In hi~ au tobiograph y, Leonardo Bru ni eloquently descrihes ~" Fiocco, "B iblioteca," 297: ' U no voluJJ1clto di Vangeli cioe e qua nro Evangelisti in grew bonissima e

th e lure of Chrysolo ras' teaching, a ma tter disc ussed in J. Han kins, jJ/a/o i17 tlte Italian Renai.nancl/, I (Leidcn, bellissima leuera greGl e me mbrane bellissime . fu di messer manuel Crisolora greco di consta ntinopoli el
1990), 29-33. Al so see I. T homso n, "Manuel Chrysolora~ a nd the Early Italian Renaissance," GRBS 7 qual di lit ven ne ad insegna r greco a fi renze nel 1397 copeno dassi e drappi doro molto a m ico e logoro ."
(1966), 63-82. 59 Diller, "Greek Codi ces," 3 15.
"O Ibid., 318.
21 8 ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 2 19

de nce has , he retofore, been accorded the second nO lice.49 According lo it, the manuscript
left behi nd. Two particular manuscripts, one classical a nd the orher biblical, sugges t the
was sem to Ludovico Sforza , d uke of Milan , from Constantino ple "co n molta solennita."
poten tials an d the pitfalls ofth is material for my narrative .
Ludovico gave it Lo a favorite associate, Giovan ni Battista Sfondrato, who, it is stated,
The for mer, p resently Va t. Urb. gr. 82, is a grand codex of the Geogral)hy of Ptolemy
was the father of Fra ncesco Sfo ndra to, and the grandta ther of Niccolo Sfo nd rato "hora
furnished with th e requisite maps and wl;tcen about a century earlier in Constanti
cardinale." Cardinal Sfond rato or his librarian is thu s the au thor orthe e ntry, wh ich must
nople .oJ Allhough th e Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci claims that the hu
have been wri tten between 1583, when he assumed tha t offi ce, and 1590, when he be
ma nist Palla Strozzi (d. 1462 ) sen t to Greece for the man uscript,54 Strozzi hi mself states
came Pope Gregory Xly' 50 Such a no te d efin es th e man uscrip t as a family heirloom and,
olherwise in his will. Leaving the man uscripl to his sons , he instructs them not to alienate
al the sam e time, embellishes its hislor y at the Sforza co url, for the ulti ma te be nefit,
it, because this was the book, wh ich Manuel Chrysoloras, "Greek o r Co nstantinople," had
nalurally, of the cardi nal and his fam ily. At the death of Gregory Xl V, the ma nuscript
brought when he came to Florence in 1397. 55 In spite of his wishes, the book rather
passed to th e papal nephew and cardi nal, Paolo Emilio Sfond ra to. In 1615, he finally
quickly fou nd its way to the vast libra ry being asse mbled by Feder igo da Montefeltro (d.
took th e Mcnologiu m o ut of the fa mily's possession, by giving it to Pope Pa ul V Borghese,
1482), co un t and later du ke of U rbino. From there, the book passed with tl1e rest of the
who p romptly p laced it in [he Vati can Library, thereby end ing its generational migration.
Urbino ma nuscripts to the Vatican Library in the seven teen th centu ry. Such a m an uscrip l
T he ma n uscri p t's possession by the Slondrato family in the sixteenth century and its
is th us well docu men ted and also well studied , than ks to a three-volu me publication
subsequent history in th e Vatican during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries be of 1932.',l;
longs to a pattern of historical reception that differed ma r ked ly from the la tel- Middle
In con trast, the second ma nuscript, owned by Palla Slrozzi an d said by him to have
Ages. T hu s by th e sixteen th century, an illustrated Byza n tine manuscript had become an
belonged to Ch rysolo ras, is a co p y of the fou r Gospels, and it re mai ns u niden lified. In
obj ect of prestige in an eco nomy of gift-giving at princely and ecclesiastical courts and,
bis will of 1462, Palla Strozzi leaves a Greek Gospel book, together with other man u
in the follow ing century, an ho nored add ition to a major Eu ropean library, whereupon
scrip ts, mostly Greek, to th e monaster y of San Gius tina in Pad uCl.j7 T he Gospel book is
it entered the realm of scholarly e xchange in which it exis ts to the present. What made
nOled in th e in ventory ofStrozzi's collection of 143 1 and is later d esc ribed in the will as
possible th ese shifts in status from Ba rtolomeo eli J acopo to Lodovico Sforza and to the
a "liu..Ie volu me" wri lle n wiLh th e most beautiful Gree k letters on th e fin est pa rch ment
Sfondrati ia mily is lhe risi ng preslige of ill ustrated Greek manuscriplS du ring the quat
trocento, th e period to which I now tu rn . and bound with boards covered with a very old and worn gold fabri c. :;~ T he description
wou ld appear to be of a Gospel book of smaller dimensions, as private manuscripts were
wa nt to be, and bou nd with expensive fabric ove r wood , a techn ique seen in a Grottafer
2. 1400-145 0
rata manuscript of the writings of a Chrysoloras contem porary, Emperor Man uel II,
I n our world, histories are often subd ivid ed by ce nturies, as if author and aud ience, to be discu ssed shortly. Diller reasonably conclu des that it is a manuscript "de luxe ."59
like the ancie nt Py111agoreans , are persuaded and reassu red by the powe r of n umbers to Regrettably nothing furth er can be said about this manu script or about an "evangclia"
reveal fun damen tal lr uths. Skepticism about such neat and tidy bundles of time is war that was owned by the contemporary h umanist Guarino Guarini (d . 1460).60
ranted in all instances. Yet it does so happen that the years aroun d 1400 witnessed a Guarino was also a stu den t of Chrysoloras a nd had transl ated his gra mmar boo k. H e
fu ndame ntal change in the Ital ian apprecia tion of Greek culture and the man uscripts followed his men to r bac k to Constantinople and lived in his household for five years.
th at tra ns mitted it, for in 1397, Manuel Chrysoloras came from Consla ntinople to teach Over the years, Gu a rino amassed a collection of Greek manuscri p ts, wh ich are known
Greek in n ore nce . Staying only th ree years, a brief interlude in a caree r pri marily spent
in th e d iplomatic service of Byzantium,SI this visiting professor had a profound impact 0:< Illustrations in J Fisch er. Claudii Ptolemalti r;eogmphiae: Codex U,billos Graecu5 82, 3 vols. (Leiden , 1932).
;"v. da Bisticci , Le i'ite, ed. Aulo Greco, II (Flore nce, 1976), 140.
upon his studen ts and u pon the course of Italian humanism. Not only did he write the
5Sv. Fanelli, "llibri de Messe r Palla di Nofri Strou.i (1372-1462)," CU/lViVl Il1ll (1949),65. See also A. Dille r,
d efinit ive and "best-selli ng" te xtbook for the study of Greek and quickly attracted de
"The Greek Cod ices of Palla Strozzi and Gua rino Veronese ," J W(l rz, 24 (1961) , 3 16. More recent literature is
voted sludents,51 but he also brought to Flo rence Greek man uscripts, some of which he
reported in P. Eleutcri and P. Canart, Scrittllra greca nell 'ulIwllesirno it(Jlimw (Milan, 1991), 30-31.
5HAs in note 53. Most recently see O. A. W. Dilke, in J. B. H arley and D. Woodward, The Histal)' of Cartogm

'9E.g., most recently Cologne. Erzbish6flichen Di6zesa nmuseurn . Biblioteca Apostolica Valicana: Liturgie und I)") (Chicago, 1987), 269-70; N. M. Swerdlow, "Th e Recover >' of th e Exact Scie nces of An tiquity: Mathe mat
Andacht illl Mit/etulter (Stuttgart, 1992), 114. ics, As tronomy, Geograph y," in Rome Relia m , ed. Anthon y C ra fLOn (Washington, D.C., 1993), 158; A. E.
"i>Vemula. "Trasmigrazio ni," 3t-l. aiou , "On Political Geographv: The Black Sea of Pachymcres,"' in The Making of Bywutine History: Strulie.1
51 That career is I-eviewed by G. T De nnis , The Letters of 1I'[nnuel /J Polaeol()glls (Was hington, 197 7), xxxv Dedicated to Donald M. Nirol, ed. R. Bea ton and C. Roueche (Aldershot, Hampshire , 1993),95.
XXX VII. 57G . Fiocco, "La casa di Palla Strozzi ," AUi della Accadenria Nazianall: dfi Lillc(~, ser. 8: Me m01ie, C/asse di
n Srienu Morali, Storiche e Filologirhe 5 (1 954). 376; idem, "La biblioteca di Palla Strozzi," Studi di hibliogmfia. e di
'2 0 Chrysoloras' visit, see R. Weiss, "Gli inizi dello studio del greco a Firenze," in his Medieval and
HU1Ilanist Greek: Collected Essays (Pad ua , 1977), 227-54: an d N. G. Wilson. Fr01ll Byzantiu?Il to Italy: Greek Studies stoTio. in onaTe di 'J.hmrrwm de M(l rillL.l, II (Vatican, 1964),297 .
in the itrilinn Remlis.wnrl' (BaILirnore, 1992), 8-12. In hi~ au tobiograph y, Leonardo Bru ni eloquently descrihes ~" Fiocco, "B iblioteca," 297: ' U no voluJJ1clto di Vangeli cioe e qua nro Evangelisti in grew bonissima e

th e lure of Chrysolo ras' teaching, a ma tter disc ussed in J. Han kins, jJ/a/o i17 tlte Italian Renai.nancl/, I (Leidcn, bellissima leuera greGl e me mbrane bellissime . fu di messer manuel Crisolora greco di consta ntinopoli el
1990), 29-33. Al so see I. T homso n, "Manuel Chrysolora~ a nd the Early Italian Renaissance," GRBS 7 qual di lit ven ne ad insegna r greco a fi renze nel 1397 copeno dassi e drappi doro molto a m ico e logoro ."
(1966), 63-82. 59 Diller, "Greek Codi ces," 3 15.
"O Ibid., 318.
220 ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 221

from an undated and exceedingly cursory inventory. Among the manuscrip ts that might
nearby the im per ial palace, and studied its Dioscu rides manuscript, which had been an
conceivably have been decorated, there are, in add irion to the evangelia, texts by John
notated and rebound only a few years earlier in 1405/6 by the Byzanti ne bi bliophi le
Chrysostom and Gregory NazianLenus and a Psalter in Greek and Latin.ti l Dille r sug
John Chortasmenos. 7u Describing it as a handsome book in a letter of 143 0 to Ambro gio
gested thal the evangelia might be the same as Wolfe nb uttel codex 3077, a twelfth
Traversari, Aurispa praised its antiqu ity, noted its pictures of plants, roots, animals, and
century Gospel book, which does happ en to contain evangelist por traits and decorated
serpents, and remarked on the annotations.71
canon cables, but the published description of the manuscri pt provides no su pport for
Besides the large cache of classical authors, Aurispa also obtained forty reli gious
the attrib ution. ';2 Finally, it was yet another student of Chrysolo ras, Niccolo Niccoli (d.
man uscri pts, wh ich were dispatched to Messina. Amo ng them were six codices ofSymeon
1437), who came to possess the largest contemporary collectio n of Greek manuscripts,
Metaphrastes, the homilies of Chrysostom, a Psalter, and what probably was a Gos pel
even though he does not appear to have been one of the master's better pupilsY<As
lectionary. 72 Anyone might have been decora ted, altho ugh no ne can be ide ntifie d today.
migh t be expected, Niccolo's library had strong classical holdings, but it also had perhaps
In another letter to Traversari from 1430, Aurispa does say, however, a bit more about
as many ecclesiastical texts. Nevertheless, only a few have even mi nimal decoration .0'1
his lecti onary. This EUOYYAW KupwKa, wri tten in mcUuscules, is an "opus mirae pulchri
Book coUectors, such a~ Niccolo Niccoli, depended upon a small num ber of age nts,
lud inis et an tiquitati s lucidae," giving more credence to the possibility of its being decor
who began in these years to travel to tlle eastern Med iterranean in search of Greek
ated.7~ Such unciallectionaries typicall y date to the tenth or eleven th century and have
manuscr ip ts. Easi ly the most successfu l of these p urveyors of books was the Sicilian Gio
at least a bit of decoration.
van ni Au rispa (d. 1459), who made two highly productive trips to the East in search of
65 By abou t 1430, Greek manusc ripts, there fore, were becoming more nu merous, at
Greek texts. From the first came a manuscript of Sophocles and Euripides and ma nu
least in Florence , and the teaching of Greek was being established in multiple cente rs.
scr ip ts of othe r classical authors. h6 The second voyage (1421 -1423) yielded the prodi
Yet for the concerns of this article, all of the above is prelude to the 1430s and LO a
gious number of 23 8 classical texts, and conveyed scholarly immortality on a person ,
particular concatenatio n of events and convergence of Eastern an d Western interests by
who otherwise was a minor humanist. Wilson, for example, considers the year that Auri
which the n umber of Byzanline religious manuscripts in Italian hands rises sharply. I
spa relurned to be "a critical point in the development of Greek studies, " t;7 and it pre
refe r to the atte mpts by the Councils of Basel (1431-37) and Ferrara/Florence (1438-39)
sumably was also critkal fo r Aurispa's personal fina nces. A number of these books were
to unite the Eastern and Western ch urches and also to the urgent need of the Byzantines
bought by Niccolo, a learned humanist, bUl also a wealthy man, who la vished large sums
LO obtain ''''estern allies. While the Council of Flore nce may have been the "success that
on his library.6~ WI1ile Aurispa was in Cons tantinople, J oh n VIII Palaeologos, then co
fai led,"74 in the sense that it failed to establish a permanent union, it did bring together
em peror with his fath er Man uel H , made Aurispa h is secretary and gave him copies of
y the ecclesiastical elites of two cultures just before one was to expire forever. More specifi
tex ts by Proco pios and Xe nophon .ti AUI'ispa also visited the Petra monastery, which was
call y, it gave the Western church a strong impetus to collect Greek manuscripts, and to
trans late the Eastern Fal hers, if for no other reason than to be able to counter arg'uments
61 H . O mont, "Les man uscrirs grec~ de Gu arino de Veronc e t la bibliotheque d e Ferrare," Rcuue des bibho

theques 2 (1892), 79-80. Diller ("Gree k Codices, " 318) says tbat rhe G rego r y manuscript is "possibly" Wolfen
fro m Greek sources.
bU llel 3651, bu t I find no supportin g evide nce in O. von H eine mann, Die Handsc1mf!cn det Herzog-lichen
During the council, discussions about Greek man uscri pts, especially co pies of St. Ba
Bibliolhek :1I Wol/enbliitel, j I: Dil' Augusteischen Halldschriften 5 (Wolfcnbuttel, 1903), 100- 10 1; or in D. Harl
sil's "Adversus Eunomium," were prolonged . Actual texts we re brought forth and made
fin ger et aI., Griechische Handscll1'iflell und Aldinen (Wolfe nbuttel, 1978), 45--47. To judge from the la uer, the

Wolfc nbuttel manuscript is early Palacologan in date and has a single illumin ated headpiece. A5 Ian Thom

available for examination by the other side .75 This regard ro r the tangibility of manu
Son notes, the in ve nto ry publisb ed by Omont an d tbe general state of Gua rinu's library is problematic, dnd
script evidence recalls the attention paid to books centuries before at the Seventh Ecu
it is unlikely tbat he re tu rned frum Constantinople with m any Greek manuscripts: "Some Notes on the
men ical Council, which also might be termed aptly, if anachronistically "a council of anti
Conte nts uf G uarino's Librar y, " Rl'lwissanc(' Quarterly 29 (1976), 169-71.

n2 Dille r, "Greek Codice$," 3 18; von He inemann, Hands(:il rijlen, I1.4, 199-200.

quaries and paleographers."76 At one point during the later proceedings, the Latin
I;.I See B. L. Ullman and P A. Stadter, The Public Librm)1of Renai~(mce Florence (Padua, 1972), 84. The total
spokesm an attempted to legitimate his version of the crucial text of St. Basil by declaring
of Gree k an d Latin manuscripts in his library ma y have been more than e ight htllld red: ibid., 60.
that it was on parchment, not paper, and had been brought from Constantinople by
'H I note th at a manuscript o f Cbrysostum (Flore nce, Bibl. Laur. San Marco 687) uf ~U). 943 is in cl uded in
Nicolaus Cusanus. 77 T he latter would have been well known to all in attendance, because
I. Spatharak is, C01PIlS oj Daled Illuminaled Greek !'vlanuscri/lts to the }-ear N53 (Leide n, 198 1), 10- 1 1, as is a New
Testament (London, Brit. Lib. Add. 11837) of 135 7: ibid., 64-65. The collection is tabulated by Ullman and
Sta uter, R Wfl'Wml Ce NOHma, 79-8 1. ?O H. Hunger,juhan nes CllOrta.llJlCIl OS (ca. 1370-w. 143(,f37): Briefe, Gedichle und Meine SchTijien. Einleilul1g,
(iSln general O Il Aurispa, sec R. Sabbadini, CflTteggio di Giovwmi r/lI riSP(. (Rome, 1931); the article by E. Regesten, ProsojJograjJllle, 7ext (Vienna. 1969), 15 , 26. 51.
7 1 Sabbadini, Carteggio, 67-68.
Bigi in Dizionario biogmfiro degli ito/iani, vol. 4 (Rom t" 1962). 593- 95; and A. Fra nceschini, Giovanni Aurispa e
10 SUfi bibliole(' f,I (Padua, 1~76). " Ibid., 11,67,69,71-72 .
to"Sabbadini, Carteggio, xiv. " Ibid ., 71-72.
," Wilson, From Byzantium, 25-26. 74]. Gill, Perso7!oLitie.1of the Council o/Florence (Oxford, 1964), 1-14.
75 J. G ill , Th e Council of Flo7"ellce (Cambridge, 1959), 150.
f>l<U llma nn a nd Stadter, Ri!nais.mnce Flm-mce, 94-95 ; L. Martin es. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists,
1390- 1460 (Princeton, 1 ~('j3), 112-16. 7G C. Mango, " Th e Availability of Books in the Byzantine Empire, \ . ll. 750-850 ," i)p ulI./inf B() ()k~ (!ltd Book
IlfISabbadini, Carteggio, xiv-xv, II. men (Washington , D.C .. 1975),30.
77]. Gill, Quae supersunt act011t11l graecontm Concilii Fiormtilli, II (Rome, 1953) . 297
220 ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 221

from an undated and exceedingly cursory inventory. Among the manuscrip ts that might
nearby the im per ial palace, and studied its Dioscu rides manuscript, which had been an
conceivably have been decorated, there are, in add irion to the evangelia, texts by John
notated and rebound only a few years earlier in 1405/6 by the Byzanti ne bi bliophi le
Chrysostom and Gregory NazianLenus and a Psalter in Greek and Latin.ti l Dille r sug
John Chortasmenos. 7u Describing it as a handsome book in a letter of 143 0 to Ambro gio
gested thal the evangelia might be the same as Wolfe nb uttel codex 3077, a twelfth
Traversari, Aurispa praised its antiqu ity, noted its pictures of plants, roots, animals, and
century Gospel book, which does happ en to contain evangelist por traits and decorated
serpents, and remarked on the annotations.71
canon cables, but the published description of the manuscri pt provides no su pport for
Besides the large cache of classical authors, Aurispa also obtained forty reli gious
the attrib ution. ';2 Finally, it was yet another student of Chrysolo ras, Niccolo Niccoli (d.
man uscri pts, wh ich were dispatched to Messina. Amo ng them were six codices ofSymeon
1437), who came to possess the largest contemporary collectio n of Greek manuscripts,
Metaphrastes, the homilies of Chrysostom, a Psalter, and what probably was a Gos pel
even though he does not appear to have been one of the master's better pupilsY<As
lectionary. 72 Anyone might have been decora ted, altho ugh no ne can be ide ntifie d today.
migh t be expected, Niccolo's library had strong classical holdings, but it also had perhaps
In another letter to Traversari from 1430, Aurispa does say, however, a bit more about
as many ecclesiastical texts. Nevertheless, only a few have even mi nimal decoration .0'1
his lecti onary. This EUOYYAW KupwKa, wri tten in mcUuscules, is an "opus mirae pulchri
Book coUectors, such a~ Niccolo Niccoli, depended upon a small num ber of age nts,
lud inis et an tiquitati s lucidae," giving more credence to the possibility of its being decor
who began in these years to travel to tlle eastern Med iterranean in search of Greek
ated.7~ Such unciallectionaries typicall y date to the tenth or eleven th century and have
manuscr ip ts. Easi ly the most successfu l of these p urveyors of books was the Sicilian Gio
at least a bit of decoration.
van ni Au rispa (d. 1459), who made two highly productive trips to the East in search of
65 By abou t 1430, Greek manusc ripts, there fore, were becoming more nu merous, at
Greek texts. From the first came a manuscript of Sophocles and Euripides and ma nu
least in Florence , and the teaching of Greek was being established in multiple cente rs.
scr ip ts of othe r classical authors. h6 The second voyage (1421 -1423) yielded the prodi
Yet for the concerns of this article, all of the above is prelude to the 1430s and LO a
gious number of 23 8 classical texts, and conveyed scholarly immortality on a person ,
particular concatenatio n of events and convergence of Eastern an d Western interests by
who otherwise was a minor humanist. Wilson, for example, considers the year that Auri
which the n umber of Byzanline religious manuscripts in Italian hands rises sharply. I
spa relurned to be "a critical point in the development of Greek studies, " t;7 and it pre
refe r to the atte mpts by the Councils of Basel (1431-37) and Ferrara/Florence (1438-39)
sumably was also critkal fo r Aurispa's personal fina nces. A number of these books were
to unite the Eastern and Western ch urches and also to the urgent need of the Byzantines
bought by Niccolo, a learned humanist, bUl also a wealthy man, who la vished large sums
LO obtain ''''estern allies. While the Council of Flore nce may have been the "success that
on his library.6~ WI1ile Aurispa was in Cons tantinople, J oh n VIII Palaeologos, then co
fai led,"74 in the sense that it failed to establish a permanent union, it did bring together
em peror with his fath er Man uel H , made Aurispa h is secretary and gave him copies of
y the ecclesiastical elites of two cultures just before one was to expire forever. More specifi
tex ts by Proco pios and Xe nophon .ti AUI'ispa also visited the Petra monastery, which was
call y, it gave the Western church a strong impetus to collect Greek manuscripts, and to
trans late the Eastern Fal hers, if for no other reason than to be able to counter arg'uments
61 H . O mont, "Les man uscrirs grec~ de Gu arino de Veronc e t la bibliotheque d e Ferrare," Rcuue des bibho

theques 2 (1892), 79-80. Diller ("Gree k Codices, " 318) says tbat rhe G rego r y manuscript is "possibly" Wolfen
fro m Greek sources.
bU llel 3651, bu t I find no supportin g evide nce in O. von H eine mann, Die Handsc1mf!cn det Herzog-lichen
During the council, discussions about Greek man uscri pts, especially co pies of St. Ba
Bibliolhek :1I Wol/enbliitel, j I: Dil' Augusteischen Halldschriften 5 (Wolfcnbuttel, 1903), 100- 10 1; or in D. Harl
sil's "Adversus Eunomium," were prolonged . Actual texts we re brought forth and made
fin ger et aI., Griechische Handscll1'iflell und Aldinen (Wolfe nbuttel, 1978), 45--47. To judge from the la uer, the

Wolfc nbuttel manuscript is early Palacologan in date and has a single illumin ated headpiece. A5 Ian Thom

available for examination by the other side .75 This regard ro r the tangibility of manu
Son notes, the in ve nto ry publisb ed by Omont an d tbe general state of Gua rinu's library is problematic, dnd
script evidence recalls the attention paid to books centuries before at the Seventh Ecu
it is unlikely tbat he re tu rned frum Constantinople with m any Greek manuscripts: "Some Notes on the
men ical Council, which also might be termed aptly, if anachronistically "a council of anti
Conte nts uf G uarino's Librar y, " Rl'lwissanc(' Quarterly 29 (1976), 169-71.

n2 Dille r, "Greek Codice$," 3 18; von He inemann, Hands(:il rijlen, I1.4, 199-200.

quaries and paleographers."76 At one point during the later proceedings, the Latin
I;.I See B. L. Ullman and P A. Stadter, The Public Librm)1of Renai~(mce Florence (Padua, 1972), 84. The total
spokesm an attempted to legitimate his version of the crucial text of St. Basil by declaring
of Gree k an d Latin manuscripts in his library ma y have been more than e ight htllld red: ibid., 60.
that it was on parchment, not paper, and had been brought from Constantinople by
'H I note th at a manuscript o f Cbrysostum (Flore nce, Bibl. Laur. San Marco 687) uf ~U). 943 is in cl uded in
Nicolaus Cusanus. 77 T he latter would have been well known to all in attendance, because
I. Spatharak is, C01PIlS oj Daled Illuminaled Greek !'vlanuscri/lts to the }-ear N53 (Leide n, 198 1), 10- 1 1, as is a New
Testament (London, Brit. Lib. Add. 11837) of 135 7: ibid., 64-65. The collection is tabulated by Ullman and
Sta uter, R Wfl'Wml Ce NOHma, 79-8 1. ?O H. Hunger,juhan nes CllOrta.llJlCIl OS (ca. 1370-w. 143(,f37): Briefe, Gedichle und Meine SchTijien. Einleilul1g,
(iSln general O Il Aurispa, sec R. Sabbadini, CflTteggio di Giovwmi r/lI riSP(. (Rome, 1931); the article by E. Regesten, ProsojJograjJllle, 7ext (Vienna. 1969), 15 , 26. 51.
7 1 Sabbadini, Carteggio, 67-68.
Bigi in Dizionario biogmfiro degli ito/iani, vol. 4 (Rom t" 1962). 593- 95; and A. Fra nceschini, Giovanni Aurispa e
10 SUfi bibliole(' f,I (Padua, 1~76). " Ibid., 11,67,69,71-72 .
to"Sabbadini, Carteggio, xiv. " Ibid ., 71-72.
," Wilson, From Byzantium, 25-26. 74]. Gill, Perso7!oLitie.1of the Council o/Florence (Oxford, 1964), 1-14.
75 J. G ill , Th e Council of Flo7"ellce (Cambridge, 1959), 150.
f>l<U llma nn a nd Stadter, Ri!nais.mnce Flm-mce, 94-95 ; L. Martin es. The Social World of the Florentine Humanists,
1390- 1460 (Princeton, 1 ~('j3), 112-16. 7G C. Mango, " Th e Availability of Books in the Byzantine Empire, \ . ll. 750-850 ," i)p ulI./inf B() ()k~ (!ltd Book
IlfISabbadini, Carteggio, xiv-xv, II. men (Washington , D.C .. 1975),30.
77]. Gill, Quae supersunt act011t11l graecontm Concilii Fiormtilli, II (Rome, 1953) . 297
222
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MAN USCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 223

he had been one of the pa pal lega tes, respons ible fo r making the final negotiations in
Constantinople for the atte ndance of the Greek delegation, bu t there were others who the equivale nt of about nine bushels of grain , John secured a well-wr itten manuscrip t,
had preceded h im. decorated with gold in itials and with a single head piece, illuminated in the Laubsages
In par ticular, Jo hn Stojkovic of Ragusa had been sent to Constantinople by the Coun ti1. 87 T he latter style is associated WiUl the finest ten th-centu ry Constantin opolitan manu
cil orBase), a nd he labored there on its behalffrom September 1435 to November 1437, scripts and suggests that the volume probably remained in the cap ital for nearly fi ve
while t-esidin g at the monastery of St. T heod osia, possibly the p resent-day Gul Camii.7x hundred years. Presu mably it was also in Constantinople that John acqu ired a copy of
In spite of becomin g friendl y with th e patriarch Joseph II-both were Bulgarian 7 ( ' _ Elias of Crete's commentary on the homilies of St. Gregory Nazianzenus, now Basel,
John was ultimately not successful in persuading the emperor to join th e Council of U niversitatsbibl. A. N. I. 8. HH T he only illustrated version of this text in existence, the book
Basel's discussions about church unity.so In order to verify quotations, the council had contains sixteen full-page miniatures that eith er illustrate specific homilies or serve as
also commissio ned John to obtain Greek manuscri pts. On February 9, 1436, a few author portraits. According to a note in the book, this paper manuscript of 396 folios
months after his ar rival, John replied to Basel that it was difficult to discover original cost "cum ligatura et omnibus circha 12 iperpera." O!) Although the manuscript and its
books of the8 l Greeks and to fin d adequate copyists, but he and his associates were COntinu miniatures are not without their problematic aspects, the illustrations probabl v date to
ing to 100k. They succeeded adm irably. To copy manuscripts, John secured the services the twelfth -cen tury. 90
of the scribe Georgios Baiophoros.H 2 He could easily have learned of the latter's talents From the same period but a different formal idiom is the single surviving miniature
from Cristoforo Garatone (d. 1448), then the apostolic nuncio to the Orient, a shipmate in another ofJ ohn's manuscripts in Basel, U niversiUitsbibl. A. N.I V.2. Presently this copy
ofJohn Stojkovic on his journey to Constantinople in 1435, and an experienced human of the Greek New Testament, less the Apocalypse, contains only the portrait of John,
ist, who spoke Greek and had collected and commissioned Greek manuscripts in Con dictating his Gospel to Prochoros and accompanied by a small vignette of the Anastasis
stantinople during th e previous decade 8 :l John was also successful in purchasing older above , a combination well established by the later tvvelfth-century date of the manu
9l
manu scripts, and he even marked some with the prices he paid. script. The manuscript may be associated with a small group of illustrated Gospel books
In one manuscript, a Psalte r with commentary by St. Basil, John wrote that he bought b'om perhaps the 1170s and the city of ConstantinopleY2 T hus once again John pur
the book in Constantinople on July 14, 1436, fo r nine h yperpyra and nine d ucatelos, 84 a chased a manuscript that had probably long been in the capital. The acquisition and its
price 85more or less in line with the cost of other manuscripts in Constantinople in those subsequent deposit in Basel might have been of greater significance for the history of
years. In 1436, a bushel of grain is reported to have cost one hyperpyron.86 T hus for New Testament studies, if Erasmus had paid as much attention to this important textual
witness as he did to others in Basel for his hasty publication of the Greek New Testament
?8Janin, Gf:ogmphie ecclesiastique III, pt. I , 144; T F. Mathews , The Byzantine Ch urch es of Istanbul: A Photo in 1516. 93 Thus Erasmus was only half right, when he pronounced the manuscript "more
gmjJ/dc Survey (U niversit), Park, Pe nn ., 1976), I ~8-29.
pretty than accurate." 9 '1
7~ V. Laurent, Le.1 "Memoire.\ " du r:Ti/llrL I~'crlf:si(l rque de I'Eglioe de COII.\/rmtilwj)le SyLvestT!' SyrujJouloJ SUT le i'Oncill'
de Flo/ella (1438-1439) (Paris, 1971), 160-61.

"uGill, Council, 82- 83.

et salaires a Byzance (Xe- XVe siecle) ," 339-74; V. Kravari, "Note sur Ie prix des manuscrits (IXe-XVe
HI E. Cecconi, Sludi storia suI Coneilio di Fimz ze, pL 1: Antpar/nili del (Om/lin (Florence, 1869), ccx-ccxi. siecle)," 375-84.
"2E. Gamillscheg, "Zur Geschichte e ine r C regor-von-]\azianz-Handschrift (Basil. A. VII.l = gr. 34)," Codi 8?Hutter, CBl'v! I, 13.
ces Manllsn-i/JtI5 (1979),104-14. 8Sc. Walter, "Un commentaire enluminc des homelies de Gregoire de Nazianze," C(//ulrch 22 (1972),
""Garatone owned two ma nuscripts in the Va tican, gr. 19 and 21, d il ted 1425 and 14.23 , respectively, and
110-29.
attributed to Baiophoros by Ernst Gamillscheg: "Zur handschriftliche Obe rlieferung byzantinischer Schul
"' .\. Vernet, "Les man uscrits grecs de Jean de Raguse (d. 1443)," BasIn ldtsdzrift fiir Gesrlticlile und AlteTtum
bucher,"jOB 26 (1977), 215-16. He must either have commissioned them or else bo ught th e m direc tly from
,;/r unrle 60 (1960), 91.
the scribe: ibid ., 228-29. In gene ral on Ga raton e , see Gill, Council, 58,63, 169; and L. Pesce, "Cristoforo
"".\mong the problems are the date and art historical context of the illustrations and their rela tionship to
Garatone trevigiano, nunzio di Euge nio IV," Rivista di Slana della Chiesa in ItaIm 28 (1974), 23- 93. A list of
the text of the manuscript. Walter ("Commentaire ," 116) thought that the miniatures we re from another
Garatone's manuscripts appears in G. Mercati, SC1'itti d'Isidoro il Cardinale Ruteno, ST 46 (Rome 1926), 106-16.
manuscript. If that is the case , might they have been added when the manuscript was rebound for John
His manuscripts passed to th e Vatican Library betwee n 1449 and 1455: Gamillscheg, "Schulbucher," 228.
Stojkovic, and might th ey be accounted among the "omnibus" thatJohn paid for? Such musings, very much
While Garatone was an important collector of G reek manuscripts in Constantinople, I have not devoted
couched in the subjunctive, need to be checked by a ree xamination of the actual manuscript, which I saw
greater attention to him, beca use all but one of his manuscripts, a copy of Gregory Nazianzenus, a re classical, too many veal'S ago to help in the prescnt co ntext.
and none are decorated.
9, R. S. :--.ielson, The 1collogmplt)' of he/ace and Milliatwf! in the Byza ntine Gospel Book (New York , 1980), 25,

"'On the manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib. AUCL D.3. 17, see R. W. Hunt, "Greek ManUSCripts in the Bod fig. 15, with further references.
leian Library fr om the Collectio n of John Stojkovic of Ragusa," Studia PalTislica, VII (= TU 92 [Berlin, 0 < III my dissertation , "Text and Image in a Byzantine Gospel Book in Istanbul (Ecumenical Patriarchate,

1966]), 77. On these coins, see P. Grie rson , Bywntine Coins (Berkeley, 1982), 342-43. cod. 3)" ('\lew York University, 1978), pp. 98-122, I argue that the miniaturist of the Basel Gospels collabo
HSCf Florence, Bibl. Laur. San Ma rco 316 bought in Constantinople in 1446 by the bishop of Conona for rated with others decOl-ating a two-volume set of the Psalter and the Gospels, Athens, Na t. Lib. lllSS . 15 and
six hyperp yra : Ga millscheg , "Schulbucher," 228-29; or Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Canon, gr. 100 bought by a Basi 93, and worked in a manner that closely compares with the illustra tions of a Gospel book in the Ecumenical
leios in the 15th century fo r Jive hy pcrpyra: Hutte r, CBM 3. J, 91. Patriarchate in Istanbul, cod. 3.
" ' H . Hunge r,Schreihf"l~
u7/(1 Le~enin BYUJm (Munich, 1989), 42. There is much useful information about 9" C. R. Gregory, 7extkritik des Nfl.en 'lestallumtes, II (Leipzig, 1902),928-31; C. C. Ta relli , "Erasmus's Manu
p r ices and salaries in ge nentl and for manuscripts in particular in the follmving arti cles in V. Kravari et al., scripts of the Gospels,"jTS 44 (1943 ), 155-62.
H01Jimes et richesses dans l'Empire /Jyzantin, II (Paris, 1991): j.-c. Ch eynet, E. Malamut, a nd C. Morrisson, "Prix 94J. H . Bentley, Humanists and Holy Ifht: New Te~la me nt Scholarship in the Rena is~ (l. nce (Princeton, 1983), 130,
who takes exception with the conclusions ofTarelli (as in the preceding note).
222
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MAN USCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSON 223

he had been one of the pa pal lega tes, respons ible fo r making the final negotiations in
Constantinople for the atte ndance of the Greek delegation, bu t there were others who the equivale nt of about nine bushels of grain , John secured a well-wr itten manuscrip t,
had preceded h im. decorated with gold in itials and with a single head piece, illuminated in the Laubsages
In par ticular, Jo hn Stojkovic of Ragusa had been sent to Constantinople by the Coun ti1. 87 T he latter style is associated WiUl the finest ten th-centu ry Constantin opolitan manu
cil orBase), a nd he labored there on its behalffrom September 1435 to November 1437, scripts and suggests that the volume probably remained in the cap ital for nearly fi ve
while t-esidin g at the monastery of St. T heod osia, possibly the p resent-day Gul Camii.7x hundred years. Presu mably it was also in Constantinople that John acqu ired a copy of
In spite of becomin g friendl y with th e patriarch Joseph II-both were Bulgarian 7 ( ' _ Elias of Crete's commentary on the homilies of St. Gregory Nazianzenus, now Basel,
John was ultimately not successful in persuading the emperor to join th e Council of U niversitatsbibl. A. N. I. 8. HH T he only illustrated version of this text in existence, the book
Basel's discussions about church unity.so In order to verify quotations, the council had contains sixteen full-page miniatures that eith er illustrate specific homilies or serve as
also commissio ned John to obtain Greek manuscri pts. On February 9, 1436, a few author portraits. According to a note in the book, this paper manuscript of 396 folios
months after his ar rival, John replied to Basel that it was difficult to discover original cost "cum ligatura et omnibus circha 12 iperpera." O!) Although the manuscript and its
books of the8 l Greeks and to fin d adequate copyists, but he and his associates were COntinu miniatures are not without their problematic aspects, the illustrations probabl v date to
ing to 100k. They succeeded adm irably. To copy manuscripts, John secured the services the twelfth -cen tury. 90
of the scribe Georgios Baiophoros.H 2 He could easily have learned of the latter's talents From the same period but a different formal idiom is the single surviving miniature
from Cristoforo Garatone (d. 1448), then the apostolic nuncio to the Orient, a shipmate in another ofJ ohn's manuscripts in Basel, U niversiUitsbibl. A. N.I V.2. Presently this copy
ofJohn Stojkovic on his journey to Constantinople in 1435, and an experienced human of the Greek New Testament, less the Apocalypse, contains only the portrait of John,
ist, who spoke Greek and had collected and commissioned Greek manuscripts in Con dictating his Gospel to Prochoros and accompanied by a small vignette of the Anastasis
stantinople during th e previous decade 8 :l John was also successful in purchasing older above , a combination well established by the later tvvelfth-century date of the manu
9l
manu scripts, and he even marked some with the prices he paid. script. The manuscript may be associated with a small group of illustrated Gospel books
In one manuscript, a Psalte r with commentary by St. Basil, John wrote that he bought b'om perhaps the 1170s and the city of ConstantinopleY2 T hus once again John pur
the book in Constantinople on July 14, 1436, fo r nine h yperpyra and nine d ucatelos, 84 a chased a manuscript that had probably long been in the capital. The acquisition and its
price 85more or less in line with the cost of other manuscripts in Constantinople in those subsequent deposit in Basel might have been of greater significance for the history of
years. In 1436, a bushel of grain is reported to have cost one hyperpyron.86 T hus for New Testament studies, if Erasmus had paid as much attention to this important textual
witness as he did to others in Basel for his hasty publication of the Greek New Testament
?8Janin, Gf:ogmphie ecclesiastique III, pt. I , 144; T F. Mathews , The Byzantine Ch urch es of Istanbul: A Photo in 1516. 93 Thus Erasmus was only half right, when he pronounced the manuscript "more
gmjJ/dc Survey (U niversit), Park, Pe nn ., 1976), I ~8-29.
pretty than accurate." 9 '1
7~ V. Laurent, Le.1 "Memoire.\ " du r:Ti/llrL I~'crlf:si(l rque de I'Eglioe de COII.\/rmtilwj)le SyLvestT!' SyrujJouloJ SUT le i'Oncill'
de Flo/ella (1438-1439) (Paris, 1971), 160-61.

"uGill, Council, 82- 83.

et salaires a Byzance (Xe- XVe siecle) ," 339-74; V. Kravari, "Note sur Ie prix des manuscrits (IXe-XVe
HI E. Cecconi, Sludi storia suI Coneilio di Fimz ze, pL 1: Antpar/nili del (Om/lin (Florence, 1869), ccx-ccxi. siecle)," 375-84.
"2E. Gamillscheg, "Zur Geschichte e ine r C regor-von-]\azianz-Handschrift (Basil. A. VII.l = gr. 34)," Codi 8?Hutter, CBl'v! I, 13.
ces Manllsn-i/JtI5 (1979),104-14. 8Sc. Walter, "Un commentaire enluminc des homelies de Gregoire de Nazianze," C(//ulrch 22 (1972),
""Garatone owned two ma nuscripts in the Va tican, gr. 19 and 21, d il ted 1425 and 14.23 , respectively, and
110-29.
attributed to Baiophoros by Ernst Gamillscheg: "Zur handschriftliche Obe rlieferung byzantinischer Schul
"' .\. Vernet, "Les man uscrits grecs de Jean de Raguse (d. 1443)," BasIn ldtsdzrift fiir Gesrlticlile und AlteTtum
bucher,"jOB 26 (1977), 215-16. He must either have commissioned them or else bo ught th e m direc tly from
,;/r unrle 60 (1960), 91.
the scribe: ibid ., 228-29. In gene ral on Ga raton e , see Gill, Council, 58,63, 169; and L. Pesce, "Cristoforo
"".\mong the problems are the date and art historical context of the illustrations and their rela tionship to
Garatone trevigiano, nunzio di Euge nio IV," Rivista di Slana della Chiesa in ItaIm 28 (1974), 23- 93. A list of
the text of the manuscript. Walter ("Commentaire ," 116) thought that the miniatures we re from another
Garatone's manuscripts appears in G. Mercati, SC1'itti d'Isidoro il Cardinale Ruteno, ST 46 (Rome 1926), 106-16.
manuscript. If that is the case , might they have been added when the manuscript was rebound for John
His manuscripts passed to th e Vatican Library betwee n 1449 and 1455: Gamillscheg, "Schulbucher," 228.
Stojkovic, and might th ey be accounted among the "omnibus" thatJohn paid for? Such musings, very much
While Garatone was an important collector of G reek manuscripts in Constantinople, I have not devoted
couched in the subjunctive, need to be checked by a ree xamination of the actual manuscript, which I saw
greater attention to him, beca use all but one of his manuscripts, a copy of Gregory Nazianzenus, a re classical, too many veal'S ago to help in the prescnt co ntext.
and none are decorated.
9, R. S. :--.ielson, The 1collogmplt)' of he/ace and Milliatwf! in the Byza ntine Gospel Book (New York , 1980), 25,

"'On the manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib. AUCL D.3. 17, see R. W. Hunt, "Greek ManUSCripts in the Bod fig. 15, with further references.
leian Library fr om the Collectio n of John Stojkovic of Ragusa," Studia PalTislica, VII (= TU 92 [Berlin, 0 < III my dissertation , "Text and Image in a Byzantine Gospel Book in Istanbul (Ecumenical Patriarchate,

1966]), 77. On these coins, see P. Grie rson , Bywntine Coins (Berkeley, 1982), 342-43. cod. 3)" ('\lew York University, 1978), pp. 98-122, I argue that the miniaturist of the Basel Gospels collabo
HSCf Florence, Bibl. Laur. San Ma rco 316 bought in Constantinople in 1446 by the bishop of Conona for rated with others decOl-ating a two-volume set of the Psalter and the Gospels, Athens, Na t. Lib. lllSS . 15 and
six hyperp yra : Ga millscheg , "Schulbucher," 228-29; or Oxford, Bodl. Lib. Canon, gr. 100 bought by a Basi 93, and worked in a manner that closely compares with the illustra tions of a Gospel book in the Ecumenical
leios in the 15th century fo r Jive hy pcrpyra: Hutte r, CBM 3. J, 91. Patriarchate in Istanbul, cod. 3.
" ' H . Hunge r,Schreihf"l~
u7/(1 Le~enin BYUJm (Munich, 1989), 42. There is much useful information about 9" C. R. Gregory, 7extkritik des Nfl.en 'lestallumtes, II (Leipzig, 1902),928-31; C. C. Ta relli , "Erasmus's Manu
p r ices and salaries in ge nentl and for manuscripts in particular in the follmving arti cles in V. Kravari et al., scripts of the Gospels,"jTS 44 (1943 ), 155-62.
H01Jimes et richesses dans l'Empire /Jyzantin, II (Paris, 1991): j.-c. Ch eynet, E. Malamut, a nd C. Morrisson, "Prix 94J. H . Bentley, Humanists and Holy Ifht: New Te~la me nt Scholarship in the Rena is~ (l. nce (Princeton, 1983), 130,
who takes exception with the conclusions ofTarelli (as in the preceding note).
224
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRlPTS
RO BERT S. NELSON 225

A final manuscript that belonged to J oh n Stojkovic and which has at least a bit of
The chm-ch , located nea r H agia Sophia, was served by her clergy, and its school was
decoration is a theological miscellan y, Oxford , Bodl. Lib . Auct. E. l .6, written in the
associated with the Patriarchal School at Hagia Sophia. lUG In 1070, Petros, 'YP0j.!j.!OUKO<;
twelfth century and then restored for John while he was in COllStantinopie.!J5 Al though
-rTV; axOATjc; XOAKOnpmelrov, completed a Gospel lectionary, Paris, Bibl. Nal. su ppl. gr.
the manuscript's very simple headbands a re not likely to find a prominent p lace in future
1096, decorated Wilh head pieces and pom-ails of seated evangelists grouped together on
histories of Byzantine ornamen t, the book does have the decided virtue of being well
a single page. I U7 The Gospels that Nicholas of Cusa acquired was probably produced
documented and well studied. Ernst Gamillscheg has iden tified the fifi:eenth -century re
aboul the same time, because its evangelist po rtraits, in this case arranged more tradi
storer as Georgios Baiophoros, who appea rs to have been associated with the Petra mon
tionally before each Gospel and accompanied by epigrams, should be assigned to the
astery. H aving acquired the Oxford miscellany for six hyperpyra and four ducateios,llG
third quarter of the eleventh century, bu t attribu ted to another illu mi nator. loH
J oh n loaned it to Nicolaus Cusanus, soon after the papal emissary ar rived in September
Nicolaus and his manuscripls returned to Italy on the vessels that he had arranged to
) 437 to negotiate the attenda nce of the Greeks at the Council of Ferrara/ Flo ren ce.!J7
transport the huge Greek delegation to the Council of Ferrara/Florence . That delegation ,
Nicolaus had already gained a considerable reputation for his abilities lO discover
ra re texts befo re and du ring the Council of Basel, and it is not surprisi ng that he began comprising the emperor John VIII Palaeologos, the patriarch Joseph II , promine nt
to acquire Greek man usClipts in Constantinople. !!H Upon return fro m his mission, some clergy, and many others, ou tfitte d itsel f with rich and elaborate paraphernalia, so as to
of the manuscripts were left with friends in Ferra ra and can no longer be identified.o!! At im press the Lati ns. For e xample, Sylvester Syropoulos, a p rominen t chu rch official at
his death, those books still remai ning in his library passed to the Hospital of St. Nicholas Hagia Sophia, notes that the valuable treasu res of the Great Chu rch we re brough t along,
in Cues; some subsequently migrated to other institu tions. I OU The collection thaI can be much to the concern of some. IU9 Syropoulos makes no specific men tion of service books,
reconstructed includes Greek books, although no ne corresponds either to the manu but since such texts were required for the liturgy, they tOo must have been brought from
script cited d uring the Council of Florence or to anoLher that Cardinal Cesarini men the treasur y of Hagia Sophia. Unfortunately, the only known survivor of that collection,
tio ned as also having been brought by Nicholas fro m Consta ntinople. 101 One manuscript termed the St. Sophia lectionary, was donated to the Great Ch urc h onJ uly 6, 1438, some
mon ths after the delegation had already arrived in Italy. I 10 However, lectionaries with
in Cues, a com mentary on the Gospel of John , has a figural headp iece, 102 but the few
other Creek ma nuscripts that can be traced to Nicolaus are withou t signi fi cant decoration elaborately decorated bindings are described in an invento ry of the treasury of Hagia
with one exce ption, Va t. gr. 358, a Gospel book illumin ated with canon ta bles, head Sophia from 1396. 11 1
pi eces, and evangelist portraits. 103 Accord ing to a Latin note, reported in 1801 , but nO\\I John VIII also brought a great many books, according to Ambrogio Traversari. In a
lost, the manuscript was bo ught in 1438 in Constantinople by Nicolaus, when he was on letter, written in March or April of 1438, Traversari explicitly men tions what would have
the papal missio n to the emperor and the "Eastern Roman bishop ." 101 interested him the most-complete editions of Plato and Plutarch and a commentary
on the works of Aristotle. 11 2 T he same letter states tllat although Bessarion left many
While this Gospel book has several later cryp tic notes in Greek, it is agai n reason able
to assume Lhat Nicolaus acqu ired a manuscript that had remained in Constan tinople manuscripts behind in Modon in the Morea, he did have with hi m a Ptolemy "cu m flguris
since inception. According to its colophon , the book was copied by Eusta thios, the "dep ap tissimis ." 11 3 With the possible exception of Bessarion's library, many or most of the
uty of th e school of the Virgin" (npWl;lI.lO<; axoATj<; nopgevou) .,or, The latter refers to the books brought by the Greek delegation would presumab ly have been taken back to Con-
school and copying ce nter of the ch urch of the Virgi n Chalkoprateia in Constantinople.
IOO R. Browning, "The Palriarchal School at Constantinople in the Twel fth Century," llywnliol! 32 (1962),
171-72.
%Hutler, CBM 3.1, 112-15 ; 3.2, figs. 294-297.
IU' lbid ., 172; Spatharak is, Cor/Jus, 29, figs . 1:;9-160.
%Ibid ., 11 3.
IU"Compare St. Petersburg, gr. 7'2 of 1061 (S path ara kis, Curpus, fig. 133). The epigrams around the minia
" Gami llscheg, "Zur Geschichte," 113; A. Krchl1ak, "Nc ue Handschr iftenLi.mde in London und Oxford,"
tures of Vat. gr. 358 are those printed by H . F. \'on Soden, Die Schnffm des Neuen Teslmnrnls 1.1 (Berlin, 1902).
Mitteilungen und FOfschungsbeilrage der Cusallus-Gesellsclzajt 3 (1963 ), 105-06.
380-81, nos. 24-27.
,.., r M. W,ms, NicoullIs C,tsanus: A Fiftetmlh-CentUl)' Vision of I\1rl./1 (Leiden, 1982). 3-5; Sa bbad in i, Scopefl~,
II , 16-27.

10" Laurent, Memoires. 188-89, and 8-9 for the sta tu s of Syropoulos al the pa triarchate.
II0R . S. Nelso n and J. Lowden , "The Palaeologina Group: Addi tiona l Manuscripts and Nc'w Questions,"
!}" Wa tts, ClISallllS, 23-24.
DOP45 (1!)91) . 63 .
""'T he collection is l"cviewed in C. Bianca. "La biblioteca ro ma na eli Niccolo Cusano," Scrillum bibliolerhe e IIIF: Miklos ich and J. Mtiller, Aria e/ diplofltllta graeca medii (levi sacm el profaua, I I (Vienna, 186'2), 567. No ne
.Ifampa a Romo nel Quatlmcl'1ltu (Vatican, 1983), 669-708. of these ma nuscripts can now be identified. Hagia Sophia surely possessed Iectionaries in earlier centuries,
101
20,82.0. Kresten, Eille Sm1l1nlullg VO lt Konzils(lklen a ilS d~1I/ Besitze des KardillaLs lsidoros von Kl'V (Vie nna, 1976), a nd in that rega rd it has bt:e n recentl y proposed that an 11 th-ccntul)f lectio nary in the Va tican Libra ry, gr,
1156, was made for the patriarchate and Hagia Sophia: M.-L. Dolezal, "Th<.: Middle Byzantine Lection ary:
IU"CUCS 18, Gospel ofJ oh n with commentary: J. Marx, Vrm.eicll1lis der Halldsc!trijte1t-Sammlung des Hospitals Textual and Pictorial Exp ression of Liturgical Ritual" (Ph.D. diss. , U nive rsity of Chicago, 199 1). Roben
zu Cues (Trier, 1905), 13. I have not Seen this manu script. Devrcesse tentat.i vely identified the latter mauuscrip t for the firsl time in an inventory of 1518: Le f Ol/ds gru
I03The manuscript is pa rtially illustrated in M. Bo nicatti , "Per una introduzione alia Cultura medi obizan de la Bibliothequr Valicalle des 07"igi1/fS Ii Paul V (Vatican, 1965), 2n.
tina di Costan tino poli ," RIASA, n.s., 9 (1960), figs. 2,4, 11 , and discussed, 213-35. 1J 2Gill, Cuuncil, 163-64.
104 R. Dcvreesse, Codices Vr.lticani Graeci. II : Codices 330-603 (Vatican, 1937),44-45. "' G. Me rcati, Uitimi contnlmti a.lIa sturia degli urnanislii, fuse. I: TraverSllrUlnll (Va tica n, 1939), 26; C. L.
lO; Ibid ., 44.
Stinger, Humanism and th.e Ch.urch Fathers: Ambrogio "FraveT:>ari (1386-1439) and Christian Al1tiquit)' in the Itali{lII
Re1wissance (Alba ny, 1977), 2 10.
224
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRlPTS
RO BERT S. NELSON 225

A final manuscript that belonged to J oh n Stojkovic and which has at least a bit of
The chm-ch , located nea r H agia Sophia, was served by her clergy, and its school was
decoration is a theological miscellan y, Oxford , Bodl. Lib . Auct. E. l .6, written in the
associated with the Patriarchal School at Hagia Sophia. lUG In 1070, Petros, 'YP0j.!j.!OUKO<;
twelfth century and then restored for John while he was in COllStantinopie.!J5 Al though
-rTV; axOATjc; XOAKOnpmelrov, completed a Gospel lectionary, Paris, Bibl. Nal. su ppl. gr.
the manuscript's very simple headbands a re not likely to find a prominent p lace in future
1096, decorated Wilh head pieces and pom-ails of seated evangelists grouped together on
histories of Byzantine ornamen t, the book does have the decided virtue of being well
a single page. I U7 The Gospels that Nicholas of Cusa acquired was probably produced
documented and well studied. Ernst Gamillscheg has iden tified the fifi:eenth -century re
aboul the same time, because its evangelist po rtraits, in this case arranged more tradi
storer as Georgios Baiophoros, who appea rs to have been associated with the Petra mon
tionally before each Gospel and accompanied by epigrams, should be assigned to the
astery. H aving acquired the Oxford miscellany for six hyperpyra and four ducateios,llG
third quarter of the eleventh century, bu t attribu ted to another illu mi nator. loH
J oh n loaned it to Nicolaus Cusanus, soon after the papal emissary ar rived in September
Nicolaus and his manuscripls returned to Italy on the vessels that he had arranged to
) 437 to negotiate the attenda nce of the Greeks at the Council of Ferrara/ Flo ren ce.!J7
transport the huge Greek delegation to the Council of Ferrara/Florence . That delegation ,
Nicolaus had already gained a considerable reputation for his abilities lO discover
ra re texts befo re and du ring the Council of Basel, and it is not surprisi ng that he began comprising the emperor John VIII Palaeologos, the patriarch Joseph II , promine nt
to acquire Greek man usClipts in Constantinople. !!H Upon return fro m his mission, some clergy, and many others, ou tfitte d itsel f with rich and elaborate paraphernalia, so as to
of the manuscripts were left with friends in Ferra ra and can no longer be identified.o!! At im press the Lati ns. For e xample, Sylvester Syropoulos, a p rominen t chu rch official at
his death, those books still remai ning in his library passed to the Hospital of St. Nicholas Hagia Sophia, notes that the valuable treasu res of the Great Chu rch we re brough t along,
in Cues; some subsequently migrated to other institu tions. I OU The collection thaI can be much to the concern of some. IU9 Syropoulos makes no specific men tion of service books,
reconstructed includes Greek books, although no ne corresponds either to the manu but since such texts were required for the liturgy, they tOo must have been brought from
script cited d uring the Council of Florence or to anoLher that Cardinal Cesarini men the treasur y of Hagia Sophia. Unfortunately, the only known survivor of that collection,
tio ned as also having been brought by Nicholas fro m Consta ntinople. 101 One manuscript termed the St. Sophia lectionary, was donated to the Great Ch urc h onJ uly 6, 1438, some
mon ths after the delegation had already arrived in Italy. I 10 However, lectionaries with
in Cues, a com mentary on the Gospel of John , has a figural headp iece, 102 but the few
other Creek ma nuscripts that can be traced to Nicolaus are withou t signi fi cant decoration elaborately decorated bindings are described in an invento ry of the treasury of Hagia
with one exce ption, Va t. gr. 358, a Gospel book illumin ated with canon ta bles, head Sophia from 1396. 11 1
pi eces, and evangelist portraits. 103 Accord ing to a Latin note, reported in 1801 , but nO\\I John VIII also brought a great many books, according to Ambrogio Traversari. In a
lost, the manuscript was bo ught in 1438 in Constantinople by Nicolaus, when he was on letter, written in March or April of 1438, Traversari explicitly men tions what would have
the papal missio n to the emperor and the "Eastern Roman bishop ." 101 interested him the most-complete editions of Plato and Plutarch and a commentary
on the works of Aristotle. 11 2 T he same letter states tllat although Bessarion left many
While this Gospel book has several later cryp tic notes in Greek, it is agai n reason able
to assume Lhat Nicolaus acqu ired a manuscript that had remained in Constan tinople manuscripts behind in Modon in the Morea, he did have with hi m a Ptolemy "cu m flguris
since inception. According to its colophon , the book was copied by Eusta thios, the "dep ap tissimis ." 11 3 With the possible exception of Bessarion's library, many or most of the
uty of th e school of the Virgin" (npWl;lI.lO<; axoATj<; nopgevou) .,or, The latter refers to the books brought by the Greek delegation would presumab ly have been taken back to Con-
school and copying ce nter of the ch urch of the Virgi n Chalkoprateia in Constantinople.
IOO R. Browning, "The Palriarchal School at Constantinople in the Twel fth Century," llywnliol! 32 (1962),
171-72.
%Hutler, CBM 3.1, 112-15 ; 3.2, figs. 294-297.
IU' lbid ., 172; Spatharak is, Cor/Jus, 29, figs . 1:;9-160.
%Ibid ., 11 3.
IU"Compare St. Petersburg, gr. 7'2 of 1061 (S path ara kis, Curpus, fig. 133). The epigrams around the minia
" Gami llscheg, "Zur Geschichte," 113; A. Krchl1ak, "Nc ue Handschr iftenLi.mde in London und Oxford,"
tures of Vat. gr. 358 are those printed by H . F. \'on Soden, Die Schnffm des Neuen Teslmnrnls 1.1 (Berlin, 1902).
Mitteilungen und FOfschungsbeilrage der Cusallus-Gesellsclzajt 3 (1963 ), 105-06.
380-81, nos. 24-27.
,.., r M. W,ms, NicoullIs C,tsanus: A Fiftetmlh-CentUl)' Vision of I\1rl./1 (Leiden, 1982). 3-5; Sa bbad in i, Scopefl~,
II , 16-27.

10" Laurent, Memoires. 188-89, and 8-9 for the sta tu s of Syropoulos al the pa triarchate.
II0R . S. Nelso n and J. Lowden , "The Palaeologina Group: Addi tiona l Manuscripts and Nc'w Questions,"
!}" Wa tts, ClISallllS, 23-24.
DOP45 (1!)91) . 63 .
""'T he collection is l"cviewed in C. Bianca. "La biblioteca ro ma na eli Niccolo Cusano," Scrillum bibliolerhe e IIIF: Miklos ich and J. Mtiller, Aria e/ diplofltllta graeca medii (levi sacm el profaua, I I (Vienna, 186'2), 567. No ne
.Ifampa a Romo nel Quatlmcl'1ltu (Vatican, 1983), 669-708. of these ma nuscripts can now be identified. Hagia Sophia surely possessed Iectionaries in earlier centuries,
101
20,82.0. Kresten, Eille Sm1l1nlullg VO lt Konzils(lklen a ilS d~1I/ Besitze des KardillaLs lsidoros von Kl'V (Vie nna, 1976), a nd in that rega rd it has bt:e n recentl y proposed that an 11 th-ccntul)f lectio nary in the Va tican Libra ry, gr,
1156, was made for the patriarchate and Hagia Sophia: M.-L. Dolezal, "Th<.: Middle Byzantine Lection ary:
IU"CUCS 18, Gospel ofJ oh n with commentary: J. Marx, Vrm.eicll1lis der Halldsc!trijte1t-Sammlung des Hospitals Textual and Pictorial Exp ression of Liturgical Ritual" (Ph.D. diss. , U nive rsity of Chicago, 199 1). Roben
zu Cues (Trier, 1905), 13. I have not Seen this manu script. Devrcesse tentat.i vely identified the latter mauuscrip t for the firsl time in an inventory of 1518: Le f Ol/ds gru
I03The manuscript is pa rtially illustrated in M. Bo nicatti , "Per una introduzione alia Cultura medi obizan de la Bibliothequr Valicalle des 07"igi1/fS Ii Paul V (Vatican, 1965), 2n.
tina di Costan tino poli ," RIASA, n.s., 9 (1960), figs. 2,4, 11 , and discussed, 213-35. 1J 2Gill, Cuuncil, 163-64.
104 R. Dcvreesse, Codices Vr.lticani Graeci. II : Codices 330-603 (Vatican, 1937),44-45. "' G. Me rcati, Uitimi contnlmti a.lIa sturia degli urnanislii, fuse. I: TraverSllrUlnll (Va tica n, 1939), 26; C. L.
lO; Ibid ., 44.
Stinger, Humanism and th.e Ch.urch Fathers: Ambrogio "FraveT:>ari (1386-1439) and Christian Al1tiquit)' in the Itali{lII
Re1wissance (Alba ny, 1977), 2 10.
226 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MANUSCRIPTS
ROB ERT S. N ELSON 22"
stantinople. As a rule , the classical texts mentioned would have lacked illumination, but
Gospels, Psalters, or lectionaries of the sort that would have been carried to impress the (d. ) 819).120 In charge of th e Biblioteca Marciana from 1778, Morelli was present whe n
the man uscript was transfer red from the treasury to the library of San Marco in 180 1.1~1
LaLins are another matter. Some may have been left for [he Latin hosts, and such an
explanation has recently been offered for the appearance of deco rated Armenian, Ethio The removal from treasury to library and from the context of devotion to that of scholar
pian , and Arabic Gospels and Psal ters in the Vatican coll ections during these years. III ship is characteristic of the age, and a simi lar epistemological shift affected the Siena
lectionary, when it entered its local library in 1786. While Mo relli is explicit about the
In regard to illumin ated manuscr ipts coming LO Italy for this occasion, fi rm evidence,
as usual, is wanting, but two manuscripts, possibly associated with J ohn VIII or the coun motivations for the transferral, J22 his reasons for associating the lectionary with John
cil, warrant furth er scrutiny. The first, an eleventh-century Gospel lectiona ry in the Bibli VIII remain obscure, and previous authors have left no trail of citations in Morelli's
oteca Ma rciana in Venice, gr. 1,53, is presently equipped with portraits of three evange writings. Thus this author is left with more than a few questions and d ou bts about the
lists. I J:, In style and date, these portraits resemble the evangelists in the Gospel book of provenance of the Venice manuscript.
Nicolaus Cusanus and especially those in the Siena lectionary. Since the latter two books Still I can affirm that such a gift has many precedents. In general, it had long been
are documented as having come fro m Constantinople , the Venice lectionary should be customary to exchange gifts in the course of diplomacy, and that cllsto m is well docu
assigned to the same provenance as well. With o nly these three evangelists, albeit profi mented in the Palaeologan peri od.'~3 Moreover, manuscr ipts th emselves had long circu
cient in every mann er, ms. gr. I, 53 might be thought to deserve the brief notice that it lated as diplomatic gifts, and a Gospel book, decorated with gems, was sent to the pope
has heretofore received in the his to ry of Byzantine manuscript ill umination. But manu in the early Byzantine period. ' 24 John Lowden has discussed similar gifts in later times. 125
scripts are not mere frames fo r pictures, as they appear in some art histories. Neither are 1n particular, John ViII had given books to Aurispa, as noted above, and his father,
the)' truly understandable when subdivided accord ing to our notions of artistic genre, by Manuel II, had sent a deluxe copy of the complete works of Dionysios the Arcopagite to
which the Venice lectionary, like its counterpart in Siena, is best kno wn for its elaborately the monastery of St. Denis, following his extensive European tour from 1399 to 1403.
gilded and enameled cover, perhaps the fine st such example surviving from the four This "politisches Geschenk" recalls a similar gift to the monastery by Emperor Michael
teenth Century.IIG Decorated in the manner of a n icon frame, Ii i or vice versa, the binding 11 in the ninth century.I~ 6 The fifteenth-century manuscript, equipped with portraits of
surrounds the Crucifixion and Anastasis on front and back with smaller feast scenes and th e imperial family, was presented to the monks in 1408 by the Byzantine ambassador,
medallions of saints in the borders. By this date, the themes of the two central panels Manuel Ch r ysoloras, who had by then returned to diplomatic duty for the empire. m
had become traditional for lectionary covers.II RBoth the lectionary and the processional Thus it is entirely plausible that John VIII presented a book or books to the doge
icon were intended for public display and vene ration, the lectionary being paraded about d uring the grandiose ceremonies attending the emperor's reception in Venice '2 8 and
the ch urch during the First Entry of the liturgy. Al though d irect pr oof is wholly lacking, thereby reciprocated the doge's generosity toward the emperor and patriarch. While in
it was objects such as this that figured among the treasures of H agia Sophia during the Ve nice, the leaders of the Greek delegation were also given presents by the pope. Syro
fourteenth cen tury. poulos, for example, notes that Cristoforo Garatone, acting on behalf of Eugenius IV,
But wh ereve r the Venice lectionary was in the fourteenth century, it is its whereabouts gave the patriarch some silver plates and a silver basin in which to wash his face.' ~" Both
during the fifteenth century that are of interest here. According to all p revious commen the Latins and the Greeks were sensitive to the real and symbolic value of such ex
tators, including the cautious and reliable Elpidio Mioni, the Venice lectionary is said to
10; Bib/ia Patres Litwgin, ed. T G. Leporace (Venice, 196 I), 9-10; M. Zorzi, Veneliap quasi allel'U.m Byzrllllium.
have been a gift from Emperor John VIII to the Republic of Venice upon his arrival for Collezioni Vel'lPziane di codid gTeci dalle racca/Ie della Bihlioteca Naziona le MaTcimlll (Venice, 1993), 18-19.
the Cou ncil of Ferrara. " a Each author cites as evidence the testimo ny ofJaco po Morelli 120C. Frati, Diz.ionano bio-biblio[;Ta/ico dei hihlinleCflri e bibliufili ilalirmi da l sec. XIV a/ XIX (Flore nce, 1933),
379-80.
"'A. Hamilton, "Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship," in Rome Reborn, 230-32. See also G. Levi
121 Mioni , Codias, 1,69.
della Vida , Rieerehe sulia j 017llflzione del pill antieo jOll(/o dtl iitD,/()v ril/i oOf!utah della BiUioleca ~ i;lican(l, ST 92
'"" One of the several manuscripts involved in the exchange was the Crimani Breviary. It was to be trans
(Vatican, 1939), 85, 91 , 440. ferred fro m the "to mb" of the treasury, where it would be of no use to anyone, to the better protection of
11 5The manuscript most recently has been discussed by I. Furlan , Corliei grni illuslia/i lieI/o BibLio/eta iV/rtrei
the library, where it could be put to good use by "students of antiquity and of the art of drawing." R. Gallo,
ana, II (Milan, 1979),9-12 , pI. I , figs . 1-2 , with further li te rature.
n Tesoro di S. Marco I' In sua :.tm'i(l (Venice, 1967), 78.
A. Grabar in H. R. Hah n loser, ed., It Tesoro di San Mr/(eo, 11: lesoro e illltUseo (Florence, 197 1), 50-52; K.
11 6 I' N. Oikonomides , " Byzantine Diplomacy, AD. 1204-1453: Means and Ends," in B'y umtine Diplomacy, ed.
Wessel, Byz.rWline E1UJrltfls (Greenwich, Conn., 1967), 196-200. It shoulcl be noted that in his discussion of J. Shepard and S. Franklin (Aldcrshot, 1992),85-86.
Byzantine covers, Grabar has switched the contents of Bib!, Marc. gr. 1, 53, the manuscript under disclISsion 1:t4j. Herrin , 'Con sta ntinople, Rome and the Franks in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries," Byzrmlill e
here, with gr. I, 55 (/L Tesoro, 52-51) , a manusC\'ipt to be discussed shortly. Dip/omacy (as in nofe 123), 104.
11 7A. Grabar, Les revetemenls en or et en argent des iennl'S byumtines du 1Il0)'en age (Ven ice, 1975), 78. 125]. Lowden, "The Luxury Book as Diplomatic Gift," Byzantine Diplomacy (as in note 123),249-60.
11 8T Velmans, "La coUVerture de l'Evangile dit de Morozov et J't':volution de la reliure byzantine," CahAre!! 12" 1(, Treu, "B yza ntinische Kaiser in d e n Sch re ibernorile n griechischer H andschriften ," BZ 65 (1972), 25.
28 (19 79), 119-29. 127 Paris, M usee du Louvre, Byzallce: LA-rt byzanlin dans les cnllertiolls publiquesjranfaises (Paris, 1992),463-64,
119E. M ioni , Bibhothecae Diui Marei Venet/mum: Codices graeci manuscripti, I (Rome, 1967), 69; C . Castella ni, with furth er literature .
Cutalogu.\ COrliCUlIl graecoT'U1II qui in Bibbotlteca/n D. Marei vimelia7'U1I/ (Venice, 1895), 70; Furlan, Codici greci, II, 12~ As described in Syropoulos: Laurent, Mhnoires, 216-19.
129 Ibid., 222-23.
226 ILLUMINATED BYZANTIN E MANUSCRIPTS
ROB ERT S. N ELSON 22"
stantinople. As a rule , the classical texts mentioned would have lacked illumination, but
Gospels, Psalters, or lectionaries of the sort that would have been carried to impress the (d. ) 819).120 In charge of th e Biblioteca Marciana from 1778, Morelli was present whe n
the man uscript was transfer red from the treasury to the library of San Marco in 180 1.1~1
LaLins are another matter. Some may have been left for [he Latin hosts, and such an
explanation has recently been offered for the appearance of deco rated Armenian, Ethio The removal from treasury to library and from the context of devotion to that of scholar
pian , and Arabic Gospels and Psal ters in the Vatican coll ections during these years. III ship is characteristic of the age, and a simi lar epistemological shift affected the Siena
lectionary, when it entered its local library in 1786. While Mo relli is explicit about the
In regard to illumin ated manuscr ipts coming LO Italy for this occasion, fi rm evidence,
as usual, is wanting, but two manuscripts, possibly associated with J ohn VIII or the coun motivations for the transferral, J22 his reasons for associating the lectionary with John
cil, warrant furth er scrutiny. The first, an eleventh-century Gospel lectiona ry in the Bibli VIII remain obscure, and previous authors have left no trail of citations in Morelli's
oteca Ma rciana in Venice, gr. 1,53, is presently equipped with portraits of three evange writings. Thus this author is left with more than a few questions and d ou bts about the
lists. I J:, In style and date, these portraits resemble the evangelists in the Gospel book of provenance of the Venice manuscript.
Nicolaus Cusanus and especially those in the Siena lectionary. Since the latter two books Still I can affirm that such a gift has many precedents. In general, it had long been
are documented as having come fro m Constantinople , the Venice lectionary should be customary to exchange gifts in the course of diplomacy, and that cllsto m is well docu
assigned to the same provenance as well. With o nly these three evangelists, albeit profi mented in the Palaeologan peri od.'~3 Moreover, manuscr ipts th emselves had long circu
cient in every mann er, ms. gr. I, 53 might be thought to deserve the brief notice that it lated as diplomatic gifts, and a Gospel book, decorated with gems, was sent to the pope
has heretofore received in the his to ry of Byzantine manuscript ill umination. But manu in the early Byzantine period. ' 24 John Lowden has discussed similar gifts in later times. 125
scripts are not mere frames fo r pictures, as they appear in some art histories. Neither are 1n particular, John ViII had given books to Aurispa, as noted above, and his father,
the)' truly understandable when subdivided accord ing to our notions of artistic genre, by Manuel II, had sent a deluxe copy of the complete works of Dionysios the Arcopagite to
which the Venice lectionary, like its counterpart in Siena, is best kno wn for its elaborately the monastery of St. Denis, following his extensive European tour from 1399 to 1403.
gilded and enameled cover, perhaps the fine st such example surviving from the four This "politisches Geschenk" recalls a similar gift to the monastery by Emperor Michael
teenth Century.IIG Decorated in the manner of a n icon frame, Ii i or vice versa, the binding 11 in the ninth century.I~ 6 The fifteenth-century manuscript, equipped with portraits of
surrounds the Crucifixion and Anastasis on front and back with smaller feast scenes and th e imperial family, was presented to the monks in 1408 by the Byzantine ambassador,
medallions of saints in the borders. By this date, the themes of the two central panels Manuel Ch r ysoloras, who had by then returned to diplomatic duty for the empire. m
had become traditional for lectionary covers.II RBoth the lectionary and the processional Thus it is entirely plausible that John VIII presented a book or books to the doge
icon were intended for public display and vene ration, the lectionary being paraded about d uring the grandiose ceremonies attending the emperor's reception in Venice '2 8 and
the ch urch during the First Entry of the liturgy. Al though d irect pr oof is wholly lacking, thereby reciprocated the doge's generosity toward the emperor and patriarch. While in
it was objects such as this that figured among the treasures of H agia Sophia during the Ve nice, the leaders of the Greek delegation were also given presents by the pope. Syro
fourteenth cen tury. poulos, for example, notes that Cristoforo Garatone, acting on behalf of Eugenius IV,
But wh ereve r the Venice lectionary was in the fourteenth century, it is its whereabouts gave the patriarch some silver plates and a silver basin in which to wash his face.' ~" Both
during the fifteenth century that are of interest here. According to all p revious commen the Latins and the Greeks were sensitive to the real and symbolic value of such ex
tators, including the cautious and reliable Elpidio Mioni, the Venice lectionary is said to
10; Bib/ia Patres Litwgin, ed. T G. Leporace (Venice, 196 I), 9-10; M. Zorzi, Veneliap quasi allel'U.m Byzrllllium.
have been a gift from Emperor John VIII to the Republic of Venice upon his arrival for Collezioni Vel'lPziane di codid gTeci dalle racca/Ie della Bihlioteca Naziona le MaTcimlll (Venice, 1993), 18-19.
the Cou ncil of Ferrara. " a Each author cites as evidence the testimo ny ofJaco po Morelli 120C. Frati, Diz.ionano bio-biblio[;Ta/ico dei hihlinleCflri e bibliufili ilalirmi da l sec. XIV a/ XIX (Flore nce, 1933),
379-80.
"'A. Hamilton, "Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship," in Rome Reborn, 230-32. See also G. Levi
121 Mioni , Codias, 1,69.
della Vida , Rieerehe sulia j 017llflzione del pill antieo jOll(/o dtl iitD,/()v ril/i oOf!utah della BiUioleca ~ i;lican(l, ST 92
'"" One of the several manuscripts involved in the exchange was the Crimani Breviary. It was to be trans
(Vatican, 1939), 85, 91 , 440. ferred fro m the "to mb" of the treasury, where it would be of no use to anyone, to the better protection of
11 5The manuscript most recently has been discussed by I. Furlan , Corliei grni illuslia/i lieI/o BibLio/eta iV/rtrei
the library, where it could be put to good use by "students of antiquity and of the art of drawing." R. Gallo,
ana, II (Milan, 1979),9-12 , pI. I , figs . 1-2 , with further li te rature.
n Tesoro di S. Marco I' In sua :.tm'i(l (Venice, 1967), 78.
A. Grabar in H. R. Hah n loser, ed., It Tesoro di San Mr/(eo, 11: lesoro e illltUseo (Florence, 197 1), 50-52; K.
11 6 I' N. Oikonomides , " Byzantine Diplomacy, AD. 1204-1453: Means and Ends," in B'y umtine Diplomacy, ed.
Wessel, Byz.rWline E1UJrltfls (Greenwich, Conn., 1967), 196-200. It shoulcl be noted that in his discussion of J. Shepard and S. Franklin (Aldcrshot, 1992),85-86.
Byzantine covers, Grabar has switched the contents of Bib!, Marc. gr. 1, 53, the manuscript under disclISsion 1:t4j. Herrin , 'Con sta ntinople, Rome and the Franks in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries," Byzrmlill e
here, with gr. I, 55 (/L Tesoro, 52-51) , a manusC\'ipt to be discussed shortly. Dip/omacy (as in nofe 123), 104.
11 7A. Grabar, Les revetemenls en or et en argent des iennl'S byumtines du 1Il0)'en age (Ven ice, 1975), 78. 125]. Lowden, "The Luxury Book as Diplomatic Gift," Byzantine Diplomacy (as in note 123),249-60.
11 8T Velmans, "La coUVerture de l'Evangile dit de Morozov et J't':volution de la reliure byzantine," CahAre!! 12" 1(, Treu, "B yza ntinische Kaiser in d e n Sch re ibernorile n griechischer H andschriften ," BZ 65 (1972), 25.
28 (19 79), 119-29. 127 Paris, M usee du Louvre, Byzallce: LA-rt byzanlin dans les cnllertiolls publiquesjranfaises (Paris, 1992),463-64,
119E. M ioni , Bibhothecae Diui Marei Venet/mum: Codices graeci manuscripti, I (Rome, 1967), 69; C . Castella ni, with furth er literature .
Cutalogu.\ COrliCUlIl graecoT'U1II qui in Bibbotlteca/n D. Marei vimelia7'U1I/ (Venice, 1895), 70; Furlan, Codici greci, II, 12~ As described in Syropoulos: Laurent, Mhnoires, 216-19.
129 Ibid., 222-23.
228
ILLUM I NAT ED BYZANTINE MANUSCRI PTS
ROBERT S. N ELSO N 229

chan ges. For his part, the patriarch bough t a paten and chalice, elabora tely crafted of
gold and silvel~ with fun d s gi ven hi m by Cris tofo ro. Accompanied by his entourage, the In addition to leavin g man uscripts behind, J ohn V II I and his en tourage pres u mably
patria rch visited the treas ur y of San Ma rco, and their reactions to the for merly Byzantine too k home sou ve nirs from the Italian to u r, and SLlch may be the ex planation fo r the
objects , repo rted by Syropoulos, show tha t the Byzantine delegation took note of both miniature added to a man uscrip t of the Psalms and the New Testam el1l o n Mt. Sinai,
images an d inscrip tions and from them drew the concl usion that the Pala d'Oro came cod. 2 123, a manuscrip t that Anne marie Weyl Carr dubbed a "tattered li ltle cod icological
from the Pantocrator Monastery, not H agia Soph ia, as they were told by their hosts. i:lO nigh tmare ." J:l ~ The manuscript, accor ding to the recem study of Gia ncarlo Prato and
Today, the Tesoro d i San Marco also con tains the so-called Unicorn ofJ ohn Palaeologus, Jose ph Sonderka mp , J:l9 co ntains miniatures that are both earlier and later than its 124 1/4 2
so named because of a Greek inscrip ti on tha t refers either to John VIII or to his dale, but one, a por trait ofJohn V III, is especially relevant to the p resent d iscussion. 11 0
fo u rteenth-century p red ecessor Joh n V. I~I T he inscription is accompanied by an image The portrait has been cut out of a larger sheet and pasted into the manuscript on foli o
of th e d ouble-headed eagle, the stand ard Palaeologan insignia d isplayed on many types 30v. The original backgroun d of the portr ait has been conti n ued onto th e man uscript
of object~ by this period , includ ing the sumptuous binding of a Greek ma n uscript at the page, and the whole surrounded by a simple frame . The d elicate brush strokes on th e
monastery of Gro ttaferrata. face , hair and bea rd, as well as the subtle re nd ition o f light and shadow bespeak a formal
T he lattel~ colllaining' vario us treatises of Emperor Manuel II and not the Cospels, idiom entirely d iffe rent from th at of Byzantine miniatures. Because the image is close ly
as sometimes re ported,I '12 is the second manuscript that has been associated with John related to the medallion portrait designed by Pisanello during the Council of Fer rara/
VII I and the council. This binding, mad e of blue silk and silver embroidery, has in the Florence, Marcell Rcstlejustly attribu ted the miniature to the artist, suggesting that John
center the double-headed eagle a nd in th e four corners the Palaeologan monogram, V I II may have obtained it directly fro m Pisanello, who m he wou ld have encountered in
a nother e mblem long associated with the dynasty. T h us the imperial significance of COI1 Fer rara. HI It could be argued, then, that the emperor hi mself once owned the ma nu
teuts and cover reinfo rce each other. Donated by Cardinal Bessarion to the monastery, script. If so, he must have taken it back to Constantinople at the concl usion of the council,
the ma nuscript bears his ex libris and, according to some, was a gift from John VIII to for its subseque nt history is in the East and is allied with that of a Greek Gospel book in
Bessario n at the Council of Florence. The no tion begins, as far as I know, with a sugges St. Petersburg, gr. 118. The latter contains a closely related se ries of miniatures and a
tion in thel Hfirst catalogue description of the man uscr ip t n 3 and is alternately treated as p ortrait of Joh n's brother, Demetrios Palaeologos, the despot of th e Morea until 1460
h ypothesis : or fact'~5 or igno red 1% by later authors. O nce more such a provenance is and afterwards a monk in Adrianople. 14 2 The Sinai manuscript was later documented on
possible, but Bessarion might also ha ve acquired the book iaLer in his career, pe rhaps lh e island of Chios, whe re it ,vas p resenled to the archbishop of Sinai in 1781.' 4 ~ Chios
eve n afte r the fall of Constantinople, when imperial collections were disrupted and at a had been a source for Greek ma nuscripts before and after the Ottoman conquest, and,
time when he was sufficiently well established in Italy to be able to collect Greek man u according to a docurnent of 1461 in Genoa, the Genoese brought books, liturgical vessels,
scripts in quantity. Ye t Jean Irigoin , who has recently assembled a group of stamped a nd relics to Chios from Pera. 144
bind ings with the im perial d evices, conclu des that such bindings , like monograms else
After the conclusion of the council in the summer of 1439, some members of the
where in man uscripts, are a sign of di rect association with the imperial family. 1B7 Presum
Greek delegation stayed behind or soon returned to Italy, and two Byza ntine prelates
ably if a book of the writings of John's father were to be alienated from the imperial
became cardinals of the Roman church, Bessarion and Isidore of Kiev. Isidore had been
collections before 1453, the person responsihle would most likely be someone like John
appointed metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia by th e patriarch in 1436 and made a
VIl I. In sum, the situa tion is similar to that of the foregoing lectionary in Venice. While
cardinal by the pope seven years later. 14 5 Like Bessarion, Isidore also took an interest in
both might be presents ofJo hn VI II from the cache of manuscripts and objects brought
ma nuscripts, even ifhe did not have as extensive a library. 1<1 0 We know, for e xample, that
by the Greek delegation to Italy, I am fully aware that no amount of evidence as to the
he borrowed illuminated prophet books (Vat. gr. 1153-1154) from the Vatican Library
plausibility of the gifts will, by itself, eve r transform either object into that gift.

ByumtillP IIlwflinalion, 121.

r: 18Carr,
":Hl lbid ., 222-25 .

"" G. Prato and J. A. M. Sonderkamp, "Libro, testo, miniature: iJ caso del cod. Sinair. gr. 21 23," Scriltum

13 ' A. Frolow in Hahnlose r, ed ., Tesoro (as in note 116), 89-90.


e Cilliltli 9 (1985), 309-2 3.
IJ2 Venezia e Bisc/1lzio (Venice , 1974), no. 120. The errOr begins with B)"Z(uttiw' ,1rl, An EUIDjiean .11.t (Athens, '40 1. Spa tharakis, The Partmit in By~(m t ill e Illuminated Manuscripts (Leide n , 1976), fig . 20 .
1964), 483. ' T he COnt e nts are described in]. W. Barke r, Manuel fJ P(J /(Juulug l/\ (1391- 1425): A Study in I,ate 14' M. Restl e, " Ein Portrat Joha nnes VII I: Paliologos au f clem Sinai," Festsci!1-iji Luitpald Dussler (M unich,
B)'um tillRSto/fs1I1onsltiji (New Bru nswick , N.]. 1969) ,4 38.
1972), 135 ; R. Weiss, Pisanella') Medallion o/ th e Ernj1emrJ ohn VI!f Polaeulogus (London, 1966), 15-16.
'~~A. Rocchi , COdites o yj)tenses leu (J bbatiar: C')7Jt (l (' Fena/ae (Grottaferrata , 1883), 501 .
''' O n th e St. Pete rsburg manuscript and its relation to Sinai 21 23 . see Sp atha ra kis , Portrait, 90-91. The
1J1]. Irigoin, " Un groupe de reliures byza ntines au mo nogramme des PaleoJogues," Reuue/roll(u ise d'his
m anuscript is further di ~c us s ed by him in "An Unusual Iconographic Ty pe of th e Seated Eva n gelist," nEtcr.
toiTe elu livre, n.s. , 36 (I 982), 283.
Xplcr,.'APX." E,. , ser. 4 , 10 (1980/8 1), 137- 16. The distinctive series of images shared by both man uscripts
'-" I' Hoffma nn, " li ne nou velle reliu re byza ntine au monogra mme des Paleologu,-,s (Ambrosianus M 46 d ese rves further study.
sup. = GR. 5 n)," ScrlplO'rium 39 (198 5),278. '43 S pa tharakis, PurtTait, 5 1.

'~H. Belrting, Da:, iilwllinierte Buell i1l dl'T .\piitl7yzantinl~\ch.en Gesellschaj i (Heiddberg, 1970), 52, 64. 14 1 L. Pastor, The History 0/ the Popes /mm 'h r' Cl()se 0/ th e Middle Ages, II (Londo n, 189 I), 209, refe rring to a

' '' ]rigoin, "Un groupe de reliures," 28 3-85. Al so see Phillipe Hoffma nn in Byu.mee: LArt byzantl:n (as in pote ntiall y fascinat.ing document in the Ge noese archives that, as fa r as I know, is unpublished .
note 127) , 469- 70.
"'; Gill, Penonalities, 68 , 74.
,..r- H is manuscripts arc discussed by Mt rcati, Scrilli d'lsli.i oTO, 60-102.
228
ILLUM I NAT ED BYZANTINE MANUSCRI PTS
ROBERT S. N ELSO N 229

chan ges. For his part, the patriarch bough t a paten and chalice, elabora tely crafted of
gold and silvel~ with fun d s gi ven hi m by Cris tofo ro. Accompanied by his entourage, the In addition to leavin g man uscripts behind, J ohn V II I and his en tourage pres u mably
patria rch visited the treas ur y of San Ma rco, and their reactions to the for merly Byzantine too k home sou ve nirs from the Italian to u r, and SLlch may be the ex planation fo r the
objects , repo rted by Syropoulos, show tha t the Byzantine delegation took note of both miniature added to a man uscrip t of the Psalms and the New Testam el1l o n Mt. Sinai,
images an d inscrip tions and from them drew the concl usion that the Pala d'Oro came cod. 2 123, a manuscrip t that Anne marie Weyl Carr dubbed a "tattered li ltle cod icological
from the Pantocrator Monastery, not H agia Soph ia, as they were told by their hosts. i:lO nigh tmare ." J:l ~ The manuscript, accor ding to the recem study of Gia ncarlo Prato and
Today, the Tesoro d i San Marco also con tains the so-called Unicorn ofJ ohn Palaeologus, Jose ph Sonderka mp , J:l9 co ntains miniatures that are both earlier and later than its 124 1/4 2
so named because of a Greek inscrip ti on tha t refers either to John VIII or to his dale, but one, a por trait ofJohn V III, is especially relevant to the p resent d iscussion. 11 0
fo u rteenth-century p red ecessor Joh n V. I~I T he inscription is accompanied by an image The portrait has been cut out of a larger sheet and pasted into the manuscript on foli o
of th e d ouble-headed eagle, the stand ard Palaeologan insignia d isplayed on many types 30v. The original backgroun d of the portr ait has been conti n ued onto th e man uscript
of object~ by this period , includ ing the sumptuous binding of a Greek ma n uscript at the page, and the whole surrounded by a simple frame . The d elicate brush strokes on th e
monastery of Gro ttaferrata. face , hair and bea rd, as well as the subtle re nd ition o f light and shadow bespeak a formal
T he lattel~ colllaining' vario us treatises of Emperor Manuel II and not the Cospels, idiom entirely d iffe rent from th at of Byzantine miniatures. Because the image is close ly
as sometimes re ported,I '12 is the second manuscript that has been associated with John related to the medallion portrait designed by Pisanello during the Council of Fer rara/
VII I and the council. This binding, mad e of blue silk and silver embroidery, has in the Florence, Marcell Rcstlejustly attribu ted the miniature to the artist, suggesting that John
center the double-headed eagle a nd in th e four corners the Palaeologan monogram, V I II may have obtained it directly fro m Pisanello, who m he wou ld have encountered in
a nother e mblem long associated with the dynasty. T h us the imperial significance of COI1 Fer rara. HI It could be argued, then, that the emperor hi mself once owned the ma nu
teuts and cover reinfo rce each other. Donated by Cardinal Bessarion to the monastery, script. If so, he must have taken it back to Constantinople at the concl usion of the council,
the ma nuscript bears his ex libris and, according to some, was a gift from John VIII to for its subseque nt history is in the East and is allied with that of a Greek Gospel book in
Bessario n at the Council of Florence. The no tion begins, as far as I know, with a sugges St. Petersburg, gr. 118. The latter contains a closely related se ries of miniatures and a
tion in thel Hfirst catalogue description of the man uscr ip t n 3 and is alternately treated as p ortrait of Joh n's brother, Demetrios Palaeologos, the despot of th e Morea until 1460
h ypothesis : or fact'~5 or igno red 1% by later authors. O nce more such a provenance is and afterwards a monk in Adrianople. 14 2 The Sinai manuscript was later documented on
possible, but Bessarion might also ha ve acquired the book iaLer in his career, pe rhaps lh e island of Chios, whe re it ,vas p resenled to the archbishop of Sinai in 1781.' 4 ~ Chios
eve n afte r the fall of Constantinople, when imperial collections were disrupted and at a had been a source for Greek ma nuscripts before and after the Ottoman conquest, and,
time when he was sufficiently well established in Italy to be able to collect Greek man u according to a docurnent of 1461 in Genoa, the Genoese brought books, liturgical vessels,
scripts in quantity. Ye t Jean Irigoin , who has recently assembled a group of stamped a nd relics to Chios from Pera. 144
bind ings with the im perial d evices, conclu des that such bindings , like monograms else
After the conclusion of the council in the summer of 1439, some members of the
where in man uscripts, are a sign of di rect association with the imperial family. 1B7 Presum
Greek delegation stayed behind or soon returned to Italy, and two Byza ntine prelates
ably if a book of the writings of John's father were to be alienated from the imperial
became cardinals of the Roman church, Bessarion and Isidore of Kiev. Isidore had been
collections before 1453, the person responsihle would most likely be someone like John
appointed metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia by th e patriarch in 1436 and made a
VIl I. In sum, the situa tion is similar to that of the foregoing lectionary in Venice. While
cardinal by the pope seven years later. 14 5 Like Bessarion, Isidore also took an interest in
both might be presents ofJo hn VI II from the cache of manuscripts and objects brought
ma nuscripts, even ifhe did not have as extensive a library. 1<1 0 We know, for e xample, that
by the Greek delegation to Italy, I am fully aware that no amount of evidence as to the
he borrowed illuminated prophet books (Vat. gr. 1153-1154) from the Vatican Library
plausibility of the gifts will, by itself, eve r transform either object into that gift.

ByumtillP IIlwflinalion, 121.

r: 18Carr,
":Hl lbid ., 222-25 .

"" G. Prato and J. A. M. Sonderkamp, "Libro, testo, miniature: iJ caso del cod. Sinair. gr. 21 23," Scriltum

13 ' A. Frolow in Hahnlose r, ed ., Tesoro (as in note 116), 89-90.


e Cilliltli 9 (1985), 309-2 3.
IJ2 Venezia e Bisc/1lzio (Venice , 1974), no. 120. The errOr begins with B)"Z(uttiw' ,1rl, An EUIDjiean .11.t (Athens, '40 1. Spa tharakis, The Partmit in By~(m t ill e Illuminated Manuscripts (Leide n , 1976), fig . 20 .
1964), 483. ' T he COnt e nts are described in]. W. Barke r, Manuel fJ P(J /(Juulug l/\ (1391- 1425): A Study in I,ate 14' M. Restl e, " Ein Portrat Joha nnes VII I: Paliologos au f clem Sinai," Festsci!1-iji Luitpald Dussler (M unich,
B)'um tillRSto/fs1I1onsltiji (New Bru nswick , N.]. 1969) ,4 38.
1972), 135 ; R. Weiss, Pisanella') Medallion o/ th e Ernj1emrJ ohn VI!f Polaeulogus (London, 1966), 15-16.
'~~A. Rocchi , COdites o yj)tenses leu (J bbatiar: C')7Jt (l (' Fena/ae (Grottaferrata , 1883), 501 .
''' O n th e St. Pete rsburg manuscript and its relation to Sinai 21 23 . see Sp atha ra kis , Portrait, 90-91. The
1J1]. Irigoin, " Un groupe de reliures byza ntines au mo nogramme des PaleoJogues," Reuue/roll(u ise d'his
m anuscript is further di ~c us s ed by him in "An Unusual Iconographic Ty pe of th e Seated Eva n gelist," nEtcr.
toiTe elu livre, n.s. , 36 (I 982), 283.
Xplcr,.'APX." E,. , ser. 4 , 10 (1980/8 1), 137- 16. The distinctive series of images shared by both man uscripts
'-" I' Hoffma nn, " li ne nou velle reliu re byza ntine au monogra mme des Paleologu,-,s (Ambrosianus M 46 d ese rves further study.
sup. = GR. 5 n)," ScrlplO'rium 39 (198 5),278. '43 S pa tharakis, PurtTait, 5 1.

'~H. Belrting, Da:, iilwllinierte Buell i1l dl'T .\piitl7yzantinl~\ch.en Gesellschaj i (Heiddberg, 1970), 52, 64. 14 1 L. Pastor, The History 0/ the Popes /mm 'h r' Cl()se 0/ th e Middle Ages, II (Londo n, 189 I), 209, refe rring to a

' '' ]rigoin, "Un groupe de reliures," 28 3-85. Al so see Phillipe Hoffma nn in Byu.mee: LArt byzantl:n (as in pote ntiall y fascinat.ing document in the Ge noese archives that, as fa r as I know, is unpublished .
note 127) , 469- 70.
"'; Gill, Penonalities, 68 , 74.
,..r- H is manuscripts arc discussed by Mt rcati, Scrilli d'lsli.i oTO, 60-102.
23 0
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROB ERT S. NELSON 231

arou nd the middl e of the centu ry, th ereby localizing these ill u minated Byza nti ne manu
I1 7 Bessarion took note of the relative beauty of his manuscripts ,154 and certainly Bessarion
scripts in Ro me in those years. Furthermore, Mercati has proposed that Isidore was
responsible for bringing to Rome a deluxe copy of the HearJenly Ladder ofJohn Climacus, o.. vned a number of illuminated manuscripts that are celebrated tod ay. Yet given Bes!Sari
Vat. gr. 394, of the eleve nth century. 14R Isidore's predecessor as the Russian metropolitan on's repu tation as both a bibliophile and a philologist, the suspicion remains that he was
had dedicated th e manuscript to the metropole of Moscow, and it is reasonable to Con build ing a library first , and a collection of fin e books second.
clude that Isidore acquired the manuscript during his Ru ssian travels. Bessarion obtained his Greek manuscripts eithe r by retaining scribes, such as Rhosos,
to copy new books for him in Italy and Crete or by purchasing older manuscripts
Tur-ni ng to Cardinal Bessarion, the re is, of course, an almost embarrassing abun
dance of ma terial, when compared to earlier Italian collectors of Greek manuscripts. lhrough agents in various places. 155 Niccolo Perotti, for example, sent him four books
Bessarion already had a considerable library before emigrating to Italy, but with the new fro m Trebizond, including the four Gospels, the homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, and
resources available to him, and galvanized by the threat to Greek culture after the fall of two classical texts . )',6 The illustrated Pseudo-Oppian (Bib!. Marc. gr. 479) had been
Constantinople, he set out to form a comprehensive collection of Greek literature, both owned by Giovanni Aurispa,1 57 and the cardinal was an eager purchaser of the Greek
sacred an d profane. I n 1468, he do na ted to the Republic of Venice his library that in man uscripts that remained in Aurispa's possession at his death in 1459.158 Although in
cluded 482 Greek manuscripts,149 a number of which were illuminated-the aforemt.!n for mation about the creation of Bessarion's library is ava.ilable, the source for any particu
tioned Psalter of Basil II, a copy of PseudO-Oppian (Bib!. Marc. gr. 479), and various lar manuscript is not always known, especially in the case of those religious manuscripts
Gospel books and lectionaries, inclu d ing one adapted by Bessarion for contemporary o f interest to the present study. It is tempting, however, to associate the uncial lectionary
use (Bib!. Marc. gr. 12).150 The latter, written in uncials, is yet another middle Byzantine that Rhosos revised with the aforementioned decorated EuaYYAw KUPWKO, also written
lectionary, probably written in Constantinople and embellished with illuminated head in uncials, that Aurispa had brought back from Constantinople in 1423. Admittedly, how
pieces and initials and with evangelist portraits, two of which survive. 15 1 ever, the latter is not precisely identified in the final inventory of Aurispa's books. 159
The scribe of the refashioning was Ioannes Rhosos, an emigre himself, who for fifty The only rival in aU of Europe to the collection of Greek manuscripts that Bessarion
years copied scores of Greek texts for diverse Italia n patrons. Mioni has noted that assembled in Rome and later dispatched to Venice was the library that Pope Nicholas V
Rhosos replaced various sections of the lectionary with different readings, while retaining (1447-55) and later Sixtus IV (1471-84) created at the Vatican. The pontificate ofNicho
the original Byzantine headpieces and initials. 152 Rhosos era:sed and rewrote some pages, las represents a qualitative and quantitative shift in the collecting of Greek manuscripts
added passages in the margins, but was careful to save and reuse the Byzantine initials. and thus marks the beginning of the efflorescence of Greek studies and manuscript ac
Some were cut OUt and pasted in new locations, rc::;ulting in bizarre duplications, where quisitions during the latter half of the fifteenth century, developments quite beyond the
two original initials appear side by side. )-,; Wh y Bessarion felt the need to alter the text limits of the present paper. Suffice it to conclude that the collecting of Greek manuscripts
of a Greek lectionary has yet to be explained. Perhaps the explanation will be found in during this period became institutionalized and supported by resources, financial and
the history of the Byzantine lectionary text and a change in liturgical practice between others, that far exceeded those available even to wealthy aristocrats in Florence or to
the original text of the tenth or eleventh century and the fifteenth century, or it might a well-connected Greek cardinal in Rome. Nicholas' agents procured Greek and Latin
be credited to the more basic differences between Greek and Latin liturgical customs. manuscripts from throughout eastern and western Europe and were at work in Constan
That Bessarion, himself Greek in origin of course, may have come to regard this Byzan tinople before and after the Turkish conquest. 160Trained as a humanist and present dur
tine manuscript as somewhat foreign is suggested by his curious reference to "more gre ing the debates of the Council of Florence, Nicholas, according to the account of the
corum" in his note of ownership: "Euangelia quotidiana more grecorum meus b. card. Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, had a lifetime interest in two things-build
Tusculani." The act of refashioning, while preserving the old decoration, may suggest ings and books. Before he became pope and when he was comparatively impoverished,
that Bessarion was interested in Byzantine illumination per se. Moreover, in his ex Iibris, the then Tommaso Parentuccelli would go into debt to pay the scribes and miniaturists
of his books. 161As pope and with the significant backing of the proceeds from the Jubilee
'''Devreesse, Fonds grec, 40. On the manuscrip ts most recently, J. Lowden, I11lllltinateri Prophet Books: A

Siudy o/B)lzontine k/rlJlllscripl.l o/Iht' Mojor andl'VIinor PTophets (Uni ve rsity Pa rk, Penn., 198~), ~2-38.
151Mioni, "Bessarione bibliofilo," 76.
" " Mercati, Sail/i d'/sidom, 65, 71. The provenance of the manuscript is also discussed by J. R. Marrin , The
J55 S ee the detailed discussion of one of those agents, Michael Apostolis, in Geanakoplos, Gm:h Seha/an,
iIlltltration
Gmeci, II, 94.0/ tlte Heavenly Ladder 0/Jolm Ciimru;us (Princeton, 1954) , 179-ilO; and Oevreesse, Cor/ier'O, Vaticani
73-110
156 E. Muntz and P. Fabre, La BibLioth eque du Vatican (m X Ve siecl(' (Paris , 1887), 114; G. Mcrcati, Per La CTono
H0Most recently on Bessarion and his books, then; is IvVilson, From Byw1IIii/1l/, 62- 67; and M. Zorzi, La logia della. vila e degli seniti rii Niccoli! PeTotti (Rome, 1925),'1:0-41.
Libn!ri(/ di San l\JJarco (Milan, 1987), 45-61. 157 Furlan, Codiei greei, V, 18.
13!1Many of these books are included in Lepo race and Mioni, Cen to eodici.
15" Zorzi, Librcrif/., 47; Franceschini. Au rilpa, 44; Mioni , " Bessarione bibliofilo, " 73-74 ,
15 1 Furl an , Codici !:(reci, I, 39-44, figs . 30-34. ~lioni (" Bessarione bibliofilo, " 67) notes that the manuscript
1 ~!' The usual problem is that one is ne\er certain if an inventory is distinguishing between a lIlauuscrip t
has an entry referring to th e Chalkoprateia. of the four Gospels and a Gospel lectionary, a distinction that escapes some scholars even today; hence the
152 E. Mioni, "Bessari one scriba e alcune suoi collaboratori," AJiscel/rlnca Maniana di studi Bessanonl?i = Medi ambiguity of [he foll owing e ntry: "item liber quaruor Eva ngdi.starum. L. C. in carta membrana cum alb is"
OellOe UlllaIU'simo 24 (Pad ua, 1976),303. (Franceschini, Aurispa, 80),
'" Furlan, Codici greei, I, fig. 31. 160 G. Maneui, Vita Nicolai V, in Murawri , RerIt.aISS [N .S.), III (Milan, 1734), co l. 926.

161 0a Bisticci, Jlil. e, 1,45,47.


23 0
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROB ERT S. NELSON 231

arou nd the middl e of the centu ry, th ereby localizing these ill u minated Byza nti ne manu
I1 7 Bessarion took note of the relative beauty of his manuscripts ,154 and certainly Bessarion
scripts in Ro me in those years. Furthermore, Mercati has proposed that Isidore was
responsible for bringing to Rome a deluxe copy of the HearJenly Ladder ofJohn Climacus, o.. vned a number of illuminated manuscripts that are celebrated tod ay. Yet given Bes!Sari
Vat. gr. 394, of the eleve nth century. 14R Isidore's predecessor as the Russian metropolitan on's repu tation as both a bibliophile and a philologist, the suspicion remains that he was
had dedicated th e manuscript to the metropole of Moscow, and it is reasonable to Con build ing a library first , and a collection of fin e books second.
clude that Isidore acquired the manuscript during his Ru ssian travels. Bessarion obtained his Greek manuscripts eithe r by retaining scribes, such as Rhosos,
to copy new books for him in Italy and Crete or by purchasing older manuscripts
Tur-ni ng to Cardinal Bessarion, the re is, of course, an almost embarrassing abun
dance of ma terial, when compared to earlier Italian collectors of Greek manuscripts. lhrough agents in various places. 155 Niccolo Perotti, for example, sent him four books
Bessarion already had a considerable library before emigrating to Italy, but with the new fro m Trebizond, including the four Gospels, the homilies of Gregory Nazianzenus, and
resources available to him, and galvanized by the threat to Greek culture after the fall of two classical texts . )',6 The illustrated Pseudo-Oppian (Bib!. Marc. gr. 479) had been
Constantinople, he set out to form a comprehensive collection of Greek literature, both owned by Giovanni Aurispa,1 57 and the cardinal was an eager purchaser of the Greek
sacred an d profane. I n 1468, he do na ted to the Republic of Venice his library that in man uscripts that remained in Aurispa's possession at his death in 1459.158 Although in
cluded 482 Greek manuscripts,149 a number of which were illuminated-the aforemt.!n for mation about the creation of Bessarion's library is ava.ilable, the source for any particu
tioned Psalter of Basil II, a copy of PseudO-Oppian (Bib!. Marc. gr. 479), and various lar manuscript is not always known, especially in the case of those religious manuscripts
Gospel books and lectionaries, inclu d ing one adapted by Bessarion for contemporary o f interest to the present study. It is tempting, however, to associate the uncial lectionary
use (Bib!. Marc. gr. 12).150 The latter, written in uncials, is yet another middle Byzantine that Rhosos revised with the aforementioned decorated EuaYYAw KUPWKO, also written
lectionary, probably written in Constantinople and embellished with illuminated head in uncials, that Aurispa had brought back from Constantinople in 1423. Admittedly, how
pieces and initials and with evangelist portraits, two of which survive. 15 1 ever, the latter is not precisely identified in the final inventory of Aurispa's books. 159
The scribe of the refashioning was Ioannes Rhosos, an emigre himself, who for fifty The only rival in aU of Europe to the collection of Greek manuscripts that Bessarion
years copied scores of Greek texts for diverse Italia n patrons. Mioni has noted that assembled in Rome and later dispatched to Venice was the library that Pope Nicholas V
Rhosos replaced various sections of the lectionary with different readings, while retaining (1447-55) and later Sixtus IV (1471-84) created at the Vatican. The pontificate ofNicho
the original Byzantine headpieces and initials. 152 Rhosos era:sed and rewrote some pages, las represents a qualitative and quantitative shift in the collecting of Greek manuscripts
added passages in the margins, but was careful to save and reuse the Byzantine initials. and thus marks the beginning of the efflorescence of Greek studies and manuscript ac
Some were cut OUt and pasted in new locations, rc::;ulting in bizarre duplications, where quisitions during the latter half of the fifteenth century, developments quite beyond the
two original initials appear side by side. )-,; Wh y Bessarion felt the need to alter the text limits of the present paper. Suffice it to conclude that the collecting of Greek manuscripts
of a Greek lectionary has yet to be explained. Perhaps the explanation will be found in during this period became institutionalized and supported by resources, financial and
the history of the Byzantine lectionary text and a change in liturgical practice between others, that far exceeded those available even to wealthy aristocrats in Florence or to
the original text of the tenth or eleventh century and the fifteenth century, or it might a well-connected Greek cardinal in Rome. Nicholas' agents procured Greek and Latin
be credited to the more basic differences between Greek and Latin liturgical customs. manuscripts from throughout eastern and western Europe and were at work in Constan
That Bessarion, himself Greek in origin of course, may have come to regard this Byzan tinople before and after the Turkish conquest. 160Trained as a humanist and present dur
tine manuscript as somewhat foreign is suggested by his curious reference to "more gre ing the debates of the Council of Florence, Nicholas, according to the account of the
corum" in his note of ownership: "Euangelia quotidiana more grecorum meus b. card. Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, had a lifetime interest in two things-build
Tusculani." The act of refashioning, while preserving the old decoration, may suggest ings and books. Before he became pope and when he was comparatively impoverished,
that Bessarion was interested in Byzantine illumination per se. Moreover, in his ex Iibris, the then Tommaso Parentuccelli would go into debt to pay the scribes and miniaturists
of his books. 161As pope and with the significant backing of the proceeds from the Jubilee
'''Devreesse, Fonds grec, 40. On the manuscrip ts most recently, J. Lowden, I11lllltinateri Prophet Books: A

Siudy o/B)lzontine k/rlJlllscripl.l o/Iht' Mojor andl'VIinor PTophets (Uni ve rsity Pa rk, Penn., 198~), ~2-38.
151Mioni, "Bessarione bibliofilo," 76.
" " Mercati, Sail/i d'/sidom, 65, 71. The provenance of the manuscript is also discussed by J. R. Marrin , The
J55 S ee the detailed discussion of one of those agents, Michael Apostolis, in Geanakoplos, Gm:h Seha/an,
iIlltltration
Gmeci, II, 94.0/ tlte Heavenly Ladder 0/Jolm Ciimru;us (Princeton, 1954) , 179-ilO; and Oevreesse, Cor/ier'O, Vaticani
73-110
156 E. Muntz and P. Fabre, La BibLioth eque du Vatican (m X Ve siecl(' (Paris , 1887), 114; G. Mcrcati, Per La CTono
H0Most recently on Bessarion and his books, then; is IvVilson, From Byw1IIii/1l/, 62- 67; and M. Zorzi, La logia della. vila e degli seniti rii Niccoli! PeTotti (Rome, 1925),'1:0-41.
Libn!ri(/ di San l\JJarco (Milan, 1987), 45-61. 157 Furlan, Codiei greei, V, 18.
13!1Many of these books are included in Lepo race and Mioni, Cen to eodici.
15" Zorzi, Librcrif/., 47; Franceschini. Au rilpa, 44; Mioni , " Bessarione bibliofilo, " 73-74 ,
15 1 Furl an , Codici !:(reci, I, 39-44, figs . 30-34. ~lioni (" Bessarione bibliofilo, " 67) notes that the manuscript
1 ~!' The usual problem is that one is ne\er certain if an inventory is distinguishing between a lIlauuscrip t
has an entry referring to th e Chalkoprateia. of the four Gospels and a Gospel lectionary, a distinction that escapes some scholars even today; hence the
152 E. Mioni, "Bessari one scriba e alcune suoi collaboratori," AJiscel/rlnca Maniana di studi Bessanonl?i = Medi ambiguity of [he foll owing e ntry: "item liber quaruor Eva ngdi.starum. L. C. in carta membrana cum alb is"
OellOe UlllaIU'simo 24 (Pad ua, 1976),303. (Franceschini, Aurispa, 80),
'" Furlan, Codici greei, I, fig. 31. 160 G. Maneui, Vita Nicolai V, in Murawri , RerIt.aISS [N .S.), III (Milan, 1734), co l. 926.

161 0a Bisticci, Jlil. e, 1,45,47.


23 2
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSO N 233
of 1450, Nicholas was able to start a n u mbe r of buildi ng p roje<:ts in Ro me an d to establish
a library open to a certain defin ition o f the Roman public. 162 In the p rocess, the Vatican's acquired other identities, becoming, to this or that degree, Greek, Roman, Italian, papal,
holdings rose from little or nothing to 353 Gree k man uscripts by the in ventory of 1455 and Catholic, and eve ntually the object of post-Enlightenment scholarly inquiries such
that was prepared at [he begi n ning of the ponti ficate of Nicholas' successor, Calixtus as this. Because Nicholas and his successors did indeed succeed in making a hospitable
TJ I. I (;!l N icholas' concerted efforts to obtain Greek ma nuscripts and to commission trans
center for scholarship, the Vatican's Greek manuscripts have long' been the best studied
la ti ons of classical and religious tex ts from Greek into Latin made Rome th e principal anyw he re. But the collecting agenda of Renaissance humanists and popes, reaffirmed
Italian cente r for H ellenic studies at mid-century, 164 and in the process enriched those and naturalized by centuries of subsequent scholarship, should never be mistaken for
Hellenis ts fortunate enough to be in Rome and to receive commissions for tra nslations. IG5 Byzanti um itself. Thus, whereas the efforts of so many Italian agents and collectors be
T he hu man ist Francesco Filelfo even proclaimed in a le tter to Calixtus III that thanks to [ore and after 1453 did indeed manage to preserve a great proportion of the classical
Nichola!i V, Greece had not perished but had merely migrated to what was formerly literature that had survived to the late Middle Ages , it should not be forgotten that those
called Magna Grecia, 166 a claim that provides little solace to Byzantinists today. same Italians collected selectively, and much of what they left behind in Constantinople
The Byzantine manuscripts lhat Nicholas had broughl to Rome incl uded at least a has disappeared . Hence, many written records of Byzantine social, commercial, diplo
few decorated books with known art historical pedigrees, in addition to the aforemen matic, and institutional life, the type of evidence from which Western medieval historians
tioned prophet books. 167 All such manuscripts, whether secular or religious, decorated write their new histories of mentalities or of everyday life, have perished, leaving only
oJ' undecorated, were absorbed into a social and intellectual context of Renaissance Italy their traces in the form of the thousands of Byzantine lead seals that were once attached
that was far different from that prevailing in late medieval Constantinople. They were to them .
housed in a library established by Nicholas in his residence next to St. Peter's, the Vatican I n the domain of Byzantine art history, the early acquisition policies of the Italians
palace tha t beginning in this period was to become a metonym for the papacy itself. also had consequences. Humanists preferred older manuscripts, especially those written
Decorated with classically inspired frescoes,168 the library was prominently marked with in u ncial scripts. 174 They naturally wanted new and unknown texts, whether classical or
Nicholas' coats-of-arms, part of what Tafu ri calls a general process of "resignification" patristic, and a single library had no need for multiple copies of a lectionary or Gospel
that extended throughout Rome. 10') The papal manuscripts were stored in eight large book in Greek. Thus many Biblical and liturgical manuscripts of a later date were not
chests, 170 classed according to Western intellectual structures, well known to a pope that acquired. The history of Palaeologan manuscript illumination, as a result, has to be pri
had once compiled a canon of approved texts for Cosimo de 'Med ici, 17I and divided into marily written from manuscripts that are still in eastern Mediterranean collections, above
two principal calegories, the La tin and Greek libraries, no vernacular literature being all th ose on Mt. Athos. Much of the Vatican's holdings in this area were obtained through
admitted. According to Manetti, Nicholas' biographer, the pope's efforts recall those of other means. For example, the finest decorated Palaeologan manuscripts in the Vatican,
Ptolemy Philadelphus, the foun d e r of the library of AJe xandria, 172 and the strict Greek the Gospels and the Praxapostolos from the Palaeologina group (Vat. gr. 1158 and 1208),
Latin division replicates the famous libraries of imperial Rom e es tablished by Augustus, we re gifts to Pope Innocent VIII (1484-92) from the queen of Cyprus, Carlotta di Lusig
Trajan, or Hadrian. 173 nano. J75 But that story belongs to the later history ofItalian collections.
As a result of these and other resitings over the centuries, Byzantine manuscripts
In the present article, I have tried to survey the beginnings of the Italian appropria
IW" per COmune uso di tuna la corte di Roma" : ibid. , 65, also 62-63. Two excellent books recount the
tio n of Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. The two periods of my essay have yielded
history of Nicholas' building p rojects: C. W. Westfall, In Th il M()II Peljeet Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and tIll'
different results. Before 1400, Greek manuscripts, illustrated or otherwise, are rare in
Invention 0[ ConSeI01l.1 Urllfln Planning ill Rome, 1447-1455 (University Park, Pe nn., 1974); and C. Burroughs,

Italy-doubtlessly because few people could read them-so that the historical reception
From Signs If) Design: Envi1'On1nenlal Proces.\ and Re[o17Tl in Ead)' Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

IU' See Devree~se , Fonds grec, 7-36.


of Byzantine illuminated manuscripts differs significantly from that of icons or melal
"" Wilson, From Byzantium, 76-85 .

work. Thus art historical arguments predicated upon the widespread circulation of cycles
16.. Pastor, History of the POjJes, II, 199-200.

H;6 Q uoted in M untz a nd Fabre, Bibliolhi:qu~e, 37-38 n . 2.

of Byzantine miniatures need to be viewed with caution. At the same time, however, those
7
16 Among t.he illustrated manuscripts tentatively or firmly identified from the l ,t55 inventory by Dev

manuscripts that were available, e.g., the Cotton Genesis and most likely Vat. gr. 756,
recsse (Fo nds g li:C, 21 , 22) are the following: Vat. gr. :';33, Buok of Kings; Vat. gr. !l42 , Psalter; Vat. gr. 755,
may have been highly regarded, in part because they were so rare. After 1400, Greek
Book of Isaia h.
manuscripts begin to be actively acquired, so that by the time the empire feIl, a consider
"'''T Yuen , 'The 'Bibliothec<I Graeca ': Castag no, Alberti, and Ancient Sources," BUTlillgtrm Mar;flZinf! 112 able demand already existed for those manuscripts that survived the sack of Constanti
(1970), 725-36.
""'As discussed by Burroughs, From Signs to Design, 12- 15.
nople . That demand continued and inspired the considerable efforts expended to en
17Wes tfall, Paradise, 139-40.

171 Sce Vespasiano da Bisticci and the commenta ry of Greco in Vile (as in note 54), 1,46-47; also L. E.
Boyle in Rome Reborn , xi-xii.
174Already at the end of the 14th cen tury, Coluccio Salutati wa nted a manuscript of Homer "grossis literis
17" Ma neui, Vita Nico /fl i V, col. 926.
et in pergameno," and Francesco Filelfo also wanted books in uncials: Wilson , From Byumliwll, 8, 53.
In c. L. Stinger, The Renaissrmce in Rome (Bloomington, Ind., 1985). 282. I75 G. Mercati, "1 mss. biblici greci donati da Carlotta di Lusignano ad Innocenzo VIII," in his Opere Mi noTi,
II (Vatican, 1937),480-81.
23 2
ILLUMINATED BYZANTINE MANUSCRIPTS
ROBERT S. NELSO N 233
of 1450, Nicholas was able to start a n u mbe r of buildi ng p roje<:ts in Ro me an d to establish
a library open to a certain defin ition o f the Roman public. 162 In the p rocess, the Vatican's acquired other identities, becoming, to this or that degree, Greek, Roman, Italian, papal,
holdings rose from little or nothing to 353 Gree k man uscripts by the in ventory of 1455 and Catholic, and eve ntually the object of post-Enlightenment scholarly inquiries such
that was prepared at [he begi n ning of the ponti ficate of Nicholas' successor, Calixtus as this. Because Nicholas and his successors did indeed succeed in making a hospitable
TJ I. I (;!l N icholas' concerted efforts to obtain Greek ma nuscripts and to commission trans
center for scholarship, the Vatican's Greek manuscripts have long' been the best studied
la ti ons of classical and religious tex ts from Greek into Latin made Rome th e principal anyw he re. But the collecting agenda of Renaissance humanists and popes, reaffirmed
Italian cente r for H ellenic studies at mid-century, 164 and in the process enriched those and naturalized by centuries of subsequent scholarship, should never be mistaken for
Hellenis ts fortunate enough to be in Rome and to receive commissions for tra nslations. IG5 Byzanti um itself. Thus, whereas the efforts of so many Italian agents and collectors be
T he hu man ist Francesco Filelfo even proclaimed in a le tter to Calixtus III that thanks to [ore and after 1453 did indeed manage to preserve a great proportion of the classical
Nichola!i V, Greece had not perished but had merely migrated to what was formerly literature that had survived to the late Middle Ages , it should not be forgotten that those
called Magna Grecia, 166 a claim that provides little solace to Byzantinists today. same Italians collected selectively, and much of what they left behind in Constantinople
The Byzantine manuscripts lhat Nicholas had broughl to Rome incl uded at least a has disappeared . Hence, many written records of Byzantine social, commercial, diplo
few decorated books with known art historical pedigrees, in addition to the aforemen matic, and institutional life, the type of evidence from which Western medieval historians
tioned prophet books. 167 All such manuscripts, whether secular or religious, decorated write their new histories of mentalities or of everyday life, have perished, leaving only
oJ' undecorated, were absorbed into a social and intellectual context of Renaissance Italy their traces in the form of the thousands of Byzantine lead seals that were once attached
that was far different from that prevailing in late medieval Constantinople. They were to them .
housed in a library established by Nicholas in his residence next to St. Peter's, the Vatican I n the domain of Byzantine art history, the early acquisition policies of the Italians
palace tha t beginning in this period was to become a metonym for the papacy itself. also had consequences. Humanists preferred older manuscripts, especially those written
Decorated with classically inspired frescoes,168 the library was prominently marked with in u ncial scripts. 174 They naturally wanted new and unknown texts, whether classical or
Nicholas' coats-of-arms, part of what Tafu ri calls a general process of "resignification" patristic, and a single library had no need for multiple copies of a lectionary or Gospel
that extended throughout Rome. 10') The papal manuscripts were stored in eight large book in Greek. Thus many Biblical and liturgical manuscripts of a later date were not
chests, 170 classed according to Western intellectual structures, well known to a pope that acquired. The history of Palaeologan manuscript illumination, as a result, has to be pri
had once compiled a canon of approved texts for Cosimo de 'Med ici, 17I and divided into marily written from manuscripts that are still in eastern Mediterranean collections, above
two principal calegories, the La tin and Greek libraries, no vernacular literature being all th ose on Mt. Athos. Much of the Vatican's holdings in this area were obtained through
admitted. According to Manetti, Nicholas' biographer, the pope's efforts recall those of other means. For example, the finest decorated Palaeologan manuscripts in the Vatican,
Ptolemy Philadelphus, the foun d e r of the library of AJe xandria, 172 and the strict Greek the Gospels and the Praxapostolos from the Palaeologina group (Vat. gr. 1158 and 1208),
Latin division replicates the famous libraries of imperial Rom e es tablished by Augustus, we re gifts to Pope Innocent VIII (1484-92) from the queen of Cyprus, Carlotta di Lusig
Trajan, or Hadrian. 173 nano. J75 But that story belongs to the later history ofItalian collections.
As a result of these and other resitings over the centuries, Byzantine manuscripts
In the present article, I have tried to survey the beginnings of the Italian appropria
IW" per COmune uso di tuna la corte di Roma" : ibid. , 65, also 62-63. Two excellent books recount the
tio n of Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. The two periods of my essay have yielded
history of Nicholas' building p rojects: C. W. Westfall, In Th il M()II Peljeet Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and tIll'
different results. Before 1400, Greek manuscripts, illustrated or otherwise, are rare in
Invention 0[ ConSeI01l.1 Urllfln Planning ill Rome, 1447-1455 (University Park, Pe nn., 1974); and C. Burroughs,

Italy-doubtlessly because few people could read them-so that the historical reception
From Signs If) Design: Envi1'On1nenlal Proces.\ and Re[o17Tl in Ead)' Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

IU' See Devree~se , Fonds grec, 7-36.


of Byzantine illuminated manuscripts differs significantly from that of icons or melal
"" Wilson, From Byzantium, 76-85 .

work. Thus art historical arguments predicated upon the widespread circulation of cycles
16.. Pastor, History of the POjJes, II, 199-200.

H;6 Q uoted in M untz a nd Fabre, Bibliolhi:qu~e, 37-38 n . 2.

of Byzantine miniatures need to be viewed with caution. At the same time, however, those
7
16 Among t.he illustrated manuscripts tentatively or firmly identified from the l ,t55 inventory by Dev

manuscripts that were available, e.g., the Cotton Genesis and most likely Vat. gr. 756,
recsse (Fo nds g li:C, 21 , 22) are the following: Vat. gr. :';33, Buok of Kings; Vat. gr. !l42 , Psalter; Vat. gr. 755,
may have been highly regarded, in part because they were so rare. After 1400, Greek
Book of Isaia h.
manuscripts begin to be actively acquired, so that by the time the empire feIl, a consider
"'''T Yuen , 'The 'Bibliothec<I Graeca ': Castag no, Alberti, and Ancient Sources," BUTlillgtrm Mar;flZinf! 112 able demand already existed for those manuscripts that survived the sack of Constanti
(1970), 725-36.
""'As discussed by Burroughs, From Signs to Design, 12- 15.
nople . That demand continued and inspired the considerable efforts expended to en
17Wes tfall, Paradise, 139-40.

171 Sce Vespasiano da Bisticci and the commenta ry of Greco in Vile (as in note 54), 1,46-47; also L. E.
Boyle in Rome Reborn , xi-xii.
174Already at the end of the 14th cen tury, Coluccio Salutati wa nted a manuscript of Homer "grossis literis
17" Ma neui, Vita Nico /fl i V, col. 926.
et in pergameno," and Francesco Filelfo also wanted books in uncials: Wilson , From Byumliwll, 8, 53.
In c. L. Stinger, The Renaissrmce in Rome (Bloomington, Ind., 1985). 282. I75 G. Mercati, "1 mss. biblici greci donati da Carlotta di Lusignano ad Innocenzo VIII," in his Opere Mi noTi,
II (Vatican, 1937),480-81.
234 ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS ROB ERT S. NELSON 235

large collections in Rome , Florence , and elsewhere during the latter half of the [erred to them selves as Romans and later as Hellenes. It is we who call them Byzantines
fi ftee nth century.
and assi gn to the epithet "Byzantine" connotations that are very mu ch a part of Orien
Like any culture, ours included , quattrocen to Italy app ropriated what it appreciated, talism.
an d no t only Byza ntinists should be grateful for what the I talians made their own. At the What would my accou nt have looked like, if rather than taking the Re naissance , i.e.,
same ti me, it is useful and necessary to be aware that Byzantine art has passed through Italian , point of view, I had adop ted the Byzantine perspective and had attempted to
mu ltip le Italian filters from the acquisition p olicies of the early humanists, to the later understand the consequences for Byzantium of the migration of ma nuscrip ts, artifacts,
Man nerist and chauvinistic aesthetics of Giorgio Vasari and his highly influential con and scholars to t.he West? To answe r would require another paper, but I close with a few
str uction of the history of art, to the first scholarly investigations of Byzantine art, based though ts. For one thing, a narrative of absence would be more difficult to write, more
primarily on monuments in Italy. That history of reception remains largely unwritten. melancholic in tone , and more subjunctive in voice. Presumably the loss of so ma ny
In the case of illustrated Greek manuscripts, the story leads to the nineteenth century manuscripts, especially manuscripts of high prestige, such as the decorated ones, must
and its senses of Byzantine painting, mainly derived from those illuminated manuscripts have frustra ted the continuation of med ieval culture even on its for me r bases, much less
that had long been stockpiled in western European collections, and to a remarkable the kind of cultural rebirth so acclaimed for Italy. It robbed ecclesiastical co llectio ns, the
book, first published in Russian in 1876 and translated into French in 1886. Histoire de principal ones that survived the Ottomans, of the raw materials for such study in later
['art b)'ZfLntin considhe principalement dans les miniatures, "the first systematic treatment of cen turies. Bessarion had the admirable in te ntion of gathering Greek literature together
book illumination," was written by Nikodim Kondakov, "the real founder of Byzantine in one place, so tha t fut ure Greeks could preserve a heritage, wh ich distingu ished them
art history," according to the late Kurt Weitzmann, 176 whose own contribu tions were not from "barbarians and slaves," 179 but the ultimate result was to sequester that heritage in
inconsiderable. In the twentieth century, philological methods, born in the idealism of a Venetian library. Moreover, it was the seeming lack of interest shown by modern Greeks
German philology, reconfigured the history of Byzantine illumination, as did the steady in ancie nt Gree k culture, a topos of Eur opean travel accounts to the Ottom an Empire,
increase in the publication of collections outside western Europe. But the foundations of that made possible and eve n sanctioned the further appropriation of manuscripts and
that inquiry rest upon the material that began to be collected in quantity in Italy in the antiquities by the West. The argument, well know n in the nineteenth century and still
fifteenth century and then in France in the sixteenth century. encou ntered in this century, goes as follows: because easterners could not properly ap
To close my account, I want at the same time to open it up and to address the conse pr eciate what they had , westerners were the proper custodians of their artifacts. 18u The
quences of narratives such as mine . Read one wa y, it is a story with a happy ending. res ult is that accumulation of cultural treasure in Western museums and libraries with
The Italians became ever more sensitive to Greek culture and to Byzantium's role in its wh ich I began and the production of scholarly accounts about them with which I end,
preservation through the agency of, first, the Councils of Basel and Florence , and later, for now.
humanists, such as Cardinal Bessarion and Pope Nicholas V. Large numbers of Greek
manuscripts were collected and thereby preserved to this day. As both cause and effect, U uiversity of Chicago
there dev eloped a renewed interest in Greek literature, both pagan and Christian, and
something that "we" enjoy and celebrate as the Renaissance, a phenomenon seemingly 179Geanakoplos, Greek Selloifl n , 82.
1 ~IJC f. Curzon, Visits, 10: " ... when I wa s ill those countries the monas tic libraries were almost in e\'ery
un problematic and wholly positive. Indeed no less a critic of intracultural dynamics than instance utterly neglected and cast away; .. . exce pting myse lf, there was no one who wo uld ha\ c give n fi ve
Ed ward Said recently penned the following about the period : "The Greek classics served pounds for anyon e of them .... I t is only to be hoped that they [the m onksl have m ad e a better lise of th e
the Italian, French, and English humanists without the troublesome interposition of ac m oney than th ey ever did of th e manuscripts which the y have since sold tu travellers a nd to the emissaries
of mo rc enligh ten ed Europea n Governments .. n
tual Greeks. Texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated by people
who imagined an ideal commonwealth. This is one reason that scholars rarely speak
suspiciously or disparagingly of the Renaissance ." 177
Said believes that the situation is different for modern times, when "thinking about
cultural exchange involves thinking about domination and forcible appropriation: some
one loses, someone gains." 178 However, past appropriations, I would argue, are not so
different from present ones, and it is regrettable that the author of a book so remarkable
and influential as his Orientalism (1978) would not have realized that the Renaissance's
Greek literature was appropriated from people, who were very much alive. They re

17(' K. Wcitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine ManuSCTipt illumination (C hicago, 1971 ), 176 .

177 E. W. Said, CultllTeand Imperialism (New York, 1993 ), 195.

17~ lbid.
234 ILLUMINATED BYZANTI NE MANUSCRIPTS ROB ERT S. NELSON 235

large collections in Rome , Florence , and elsewhere during the latter half of the [erred to them selves as Romans and later as Hellenes. It is we who call them Byzantines
fi ftee nth century.
and assi gn to the epithet "Byzantine" connotations that are very mu ch a part of Orien
Like any culture, ours included , quattrocen to Italy app ropriated what it appreciated, talism.
an d no t only Byza ntinists should be grateful for what the I talians made their own. At the What would my accou nt have looked like, if rather than taking the Re naissance , i.e.,
same ti me, it is useful and necessary to be aware that Byzantine art has passed through Italian , point of view, I had adop ted the Byzantine perspective and had attempted to
mu ltip le Italian filters from the acquisition p olicies of the early humanists, to the later understand the consequences for Byzantium of the migration of ma nuscrip ts, artifacts,
Man nerist and chauvinistic aesthetics of Giorgio Vasari and his highly influential con and scholars to t.he West? To answe r would require another paper, but I close with a few
str uction of the history of art, to the first scholarly investigations of Byzantine art, based though ts. For one thing, a narrative of absence would be more difficult to write, more
primarily on monuments in Italy. That history of reception remains largely unwritten. melancholic in tone , and more subjunctive in voice. Presumably the loss of so ma ny
In the case of illustrated Greek manuscripts, the story leads to the nineteenth century manuscripts, especially manuscripts of high prestige, such as the decorated ones, must
and its senses of Byzantine painting, mainly derived from those illuminated manuscripts have frustra ted the continuation of med ieval culture even on its for me r bases, much less
that had long been stockpiled in western European collections, and to a remarkable the kind of cultural rebirth so acclaimed for Italy. It robbed ecclesiastical co llectio ns, the
book, first published in Russian in 1876 and translated into French in 1886. Histoire de principal ones that survived the Ottomans, of the raw materials for such study in later
['art b)'ZfLntin considhe principalement dans les miniatures, "the first systematic treatment of cen turies. Bessarion had the admirable in te ntion of gathering Greek literature together
book illumination," was written by Nikodim Kondakov, "the real founder of Byzantine in one place, so tha t fut ure Greeks could preserve a heritage, wh ich distingu ished them
art history," according to the late Kurt Weitzmann, 176 whose own contribu tions were not from "barbarians and slaves," 179 but the ultimate result was to sequester that heritage in
inconsiderable. In the twentieth century, philological methods, born in the idealism of a Venetian library. Moreover, it was the seeming lack of interest shown by modern Greeks
German philology, reconfigured the history of Byzantine illumination, as did the steady in ancie nt Gree k culture, a topos of Eur opean travel accounts to the Ottom an Empire,
increase in the publication of collections outside western Europe. But the foundations of that made possible and eve n sanctioned the further appropriation of manuscripts and
that inquiry rest upon the material that began to be collected in quantity in Italy in the antiquities by the West. The argument, well know n in the nineteenth century and still
fifteenth century and then in France in the sixteenth century. encou ntered in this century, goes as follows: because easterners could not properly ap
To close my account, I want at the same time to open it up and to address the conse pr eciate what they had , westerners were the proper custodians of their artifacts. 18u The
quences of narratives such as mine . Read one wa y, it is a story with a happy ending. res ult is that accumulation of cultural treasure in Western museums and libraries with
The Italians became ever more sensitive to Greek culture and to Byzantium's role in its wh ich I began and the production of scholarly accounts about them with which I end,
preservation through the agency of, first, the Councils of Basel and Florence , and later, for now.
humanists, such as Cardinal Bessarion and Pope Nicholas V. Large numbers of Greek
manuscripts were collected and thereby preserved to this day. As both cause and effect, U uiversity of Chicago
there dev eloped a renewed interest in Greek literature, both pagan and Christian, and
something that "we" enjoy and celebrate as the Renaissance, a phenomenon seemingly 179Geanakoplos, Greek Selloifl n , 82.
1 ~IJC f. Curzon, Visits, 10: " ... when I wa s ill those countries the monas tic libraries were almost in e\'ery
un problematic and wholly positive. Indeed no less a critic of intracultural dynamics than instance utterly neglected and cast away; .. . exce pting myse lf, there was no one who wo uld ha\ c give n fi ve
Ed ward Said recently penned the following about the period : "The Greek classics served pounds for anyon e of them .... I t is only to be hoped that they [the m onksl have m ad e a better lise of th e
the Italian, French, and English humanists without the troublesome interposition of ac m oney than th ey ever did of th e manuscripts which the y have since sold tu travellers a nd to the emissaries
of mo rc enligh ten ed Europea n Governments .. n
tual Greeks. Texts by dead people were read, appreciated, and appropriated by people
who imagined an ideal commonwealth. This is one reason that scholars rarely speak
suspiciously or disparagingly of the Renaissance ." 177
Said believes that the situation is different for modern times, when "thinking about
cultural exchange involves thinking about domination and forcible appropriation: some
one loses, someone gains." 178 However, past appropriations, I would argue, are not so
different from present ones, and it is regrettable that the author of a book so remarkable
and influential as his Orientalism (1978) would not have realized that the Renaissance's
Greek literature was appropriated from people, who were very much alive. They re

17(' K. Wcitzmann, Studies in Classical and Byzantine ManuSCTipt illumination (C hicago, 1971 ), 176 .

177 E. W. Said, CultllTeand Imperialism (New York, 1993 ), 195.

17~ lbid.

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