The Joshua Roll is a Byzantine illuminated manuscript of highly unusual format, probably of the 10th century Macedonian Renaissance, [1] believed to have been created by artists of the imperial workshops in Constantinople, [2] and now in the Vatican Library. [3]
The Roll is in the form of a continuous horizontal scroll or rotulus , common in Chinese art but unique in surviving examples of medieval Christian art. [4] It is made of several joined pieces of sheep vellum, is 31 cm high and about 10 metres long, and may be incomplete, as it starts with Chapter II and ends with Chapter X. [5] [6] The Roll covers the early part of the Old Testament Book of Joshua using a reduced version of the Septuagint text; it includes Joshua's main military successes, ending with conquered kings paying him homage. At roughly this time, the Byzantine empire was enjoying military success in its campaigns in the Holy Land. It was originally painted in grisaille, by several artists, with partial coloring added later in a separate stage. The lettering is in majuscule and minuscule forms. [5]
Sheet 12 of the Joshua Roll provides an example of many of the artistic trends and choices made by its creator that can be found throughout the roll. This sheet depicts the scene of Joshua and the Angel, where an angel appears before Joshua in a commander's uniform. Most notable is Joshua’s appearance in this sheet not once but twice: standing and prostrate. [7] The roll aims to tell a continuous narrative, and as such, figures like Joshua appear multiple times throughout the roll to accurately depict the script they accompany. However, based on the curving and squeezing of the script between and around scenes, the miniatures took clear precedent. Rather than being consistently placed throughout the roll, the writing curves around the paintings instead of the images conforming to the space allotted to them by pre-existing script. [8] This is evident in Sheet 12 of the roll and many others. The passages provide excerpts and additions to the Book of Joshua, as opposed to copying the full text, in order to better suit the illuminations. The style of the illuminations are relatively realistic in the anatomy and proportions of the figures, and there are loose attempts to add elements such as trees and cityscapes to create a sense of time and space. These elements, as well as the poses and garb of the figures, take clear inspiration from classical Roman art. Another classical element is the inclusion of personifications. In Sheet 12, for example, the city of Jericho is personified by the seated woman to the right of Joshua. [7] Female personifications of cities are found throughout the Joshua Roll, often wearing headpieces that look like small cities or buildings. [9]
Like the Paris Psalter, with which it is usually discussed, it is heavily classicising in style, though the extent to which this represents a revival or copying from a much earlier model is the subject of much debate. Its origins have been much debated by art historians, and the roll is considered to be "one of the most important and difficult problems of Byzantine art." [10] The roll itself is usually acknowledged to be of the 10th century AD, but the images are felt by most art historians to derive from one or more earlier works, perhaps going back as far as Late Antiquity. The subject produced a sharp disagreement between Kurt Weitzmann, who thought the form of the roll was a classicising invention of the Macedonian Renaissance, and Meyer Schapiro, who, whilst agreeing with Weitzmann on a 10th-century date, held to the more traditional view that painted rotuli existed in Late Antiquity, and that the roll was essentially copied from such a work, perhaps through intermediaries. [10] [11]
The images are clearly closely related to later manuscripts of the Octateuch or first eight books of the Old Testament, [12] but where and when the compositions for the cycle originated is controversial. [13]
Steven Wander, professor at the University of Connecticut, claims the images are slanted at ten degrees, in a continuous frieze along the ten meters of the roll. He suggests this may be because the roll was a copy of the actual preparatory sketches or working drawings for a real column, possibly to scale, like the Ottonian bronze Easter column (Latin : colonna) made for the bishop Bernward of Hildesheim, the Bernward Column in St Michael's Church. [14]
The 10th-century Joshua Roll is interesting as an example of Byzantine illuminated manuscript that shows the tenacious influence of Greco-Roman painting.
An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Illuminated manuscripts include liturgical books such as psalters, courtly literature, and documents such as proclamations.
A psalter is a volume containing the Book of Psalms, often with other devotional material bound in as well, such as a liturgical calendar and litany of the Saints. Until the emergence of the book of hours in the Late Middle Ages, psalters were the books most widely owned by wealthy lay persons. They were commonly used for learning to read. Many Psalters were richly illuminated, and they include some of the most spectacular surviving examples of medieval book art.
Byzantine art comprises the body of artistic products of the Eastern Roman Empire, as well as the nations and states that inherited culturally from the empire. Though the empire itself emerged from the decline of western Rome and lasted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the start date of the Byzantine period is rather clearer in art history than in political history, if still imprecise. Many Eastern Orthodox states in Eastern Europe, as well as to some degree the Islamic states of the eastern Mediterranean, preserved many aspects of the empire's culture and art for centuries afterward.
A miniature is a small illustration used to decorate an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript; the simple illustrations of the early codices having been miniated or delineated with that pigment. The generally small scale of such medieval pictures has led to etymological confusion with minuteness and to its application to small paintings, especially portrait miniatures, which did however grow from the same tradition and at least initially used similar techniques.
The St Augustine Gospels is an illuminated Gospel Book which dates from the 6th century and has been in the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 1575. It was made in Italy and has been in England since fairly soon after its creation; by the 16th century it had probably already been at Canterbury for almost a thousand years. It has 265 leaves measuring about 252 x 196 mm, and is not entirely complete, in particular missing pages with miniatures.
The Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides is an early 6th-century Byzantine Greek illuminated manuscript of an even earlier 1st century AD work, De materia medica by Pedanius Dioscorides in uncial script. It is an important and rare example of a late antique scientific text. After residing in Constantinople for just over a thousand years, the text passed to the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna in the 16th century, a century after the city fell to the Ottoman Empire.
The Syriac Bible of Paris is an illuminated Bible written in Syriac. It dates to 6th or 7th century. It is believed to have been made in northern Mesopotamia. The manuscript has 246 extant folios. Large sections of text and the accompanying illustrations are missing. The folios are 312 by 230 mm. For reasons of economy, the text is written in three columns.
The Saint Petersburg Bede, formerly known as the Leningrad Bede, is an Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript, a near-contemporary version of Bede's 8th century history, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Although not heavily illuminated, it is famous for containing the earliest historiated initial in European illumination. It is so named because it was taken to the Russian National Library of Saint Petersburg in Russia at the time of the French Revolution, by Peter P. Dubrovsky.
The Egbert Psalter is a medieval illuminated manuscript Psalter preserved in the municipal museum of Cividale, Italy. The psalter is an example of the illuminated manuscripts associated with the Ottonian Renaissance.
Ottonian art is a style in pre-romanesque German art, covering also some works from the Low Countries, northern Italy and eastern France. It was named by the art historian Hubert Janitschek after the Ottonian dynasty which ruled Germany and Northern Italy between 919 and 1024 under the kings Henry I, Otto I, Otto II, Otto III and Henry II. With Ottonian architecture, it is a key component of the Ottonian Renaissance. However, the style neither began nor ended to neatly coincide with the rule of the dynasty. It emerged some decades into their rule and persisted past the Ottonian emperors into the reigns of the early Salian dynasty, which lacks an artistic "style label" of its own. In the traditional scheme of art history, Ottonian art follows Carolingian art and precedes Romanesque art, though the transitions at both ends of the period are gradual rather than sudden. Like the former and unlike the latter, it was very largely a style restricted to a few of the small cities of the period, and important monasteries, as well as the court circles of the emperor and his leading vassals.
The Paris Psalter is a Byzantine illuminated manuscript, 38 x 26.5 cm in size, containing 449 folios and 14 full-page miniatures. The Paris Psalter is considered a key monument of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance, a 10th-century renewal of interest in classical art closely identified with the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (909-959) and his immediate successors.
Kurt Weitzmann was a German turned American art historian who was a leading figure in the study of Late Antique and Byzantine art in particular.
The Utrecht Psalter is a ninth-century illuminated psalter which is a key masterpiece of Carolingian art; it is probably the most valuable manuscript in the Netherlands. It is famous for its 166 lively pen illustrations, with one accompanying each psalm and the other texts in the manuscript. The precise purpose of these illustrations, and the extent of their dependence on earlier models, have been matters of art-historical controversy. The psalter spent the period between about 1000 to 1640 in England, where it had a profound influence on Anglo-Saxon art, giving rise to what is known as the "Utrecht style". It was copied at least three times in the Middle Ages. A complete facsimile edition of the psalter was made in 1875, and another in 1984 (Graz).
Macedonian art is the art of the Macedonian Renaissance in Byzantine art. The period followed the end of the Byzantine iconoclasm and lasted until the fall of the Macedonian dynasty, which ruled the Byzantine Empire from 867 to 1056, having originated in the theme of Macedonia. It coincided with the Ottonian Renaissance in Western Europe. In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Byzantine Empire's military situation improved, and art and architecture revived.
Macedonian Renaissance is a historiographical term used for the blossoming of Byzantine culture in the 9th–11th centuries, under the eponymous Macedonian dynasty (867–1056), following the upheavals and transformations of the 7th–8th centuries, also known as the "Byzantine Dark Ages". The period is also known as the era of Byzantine encyclopedism, because of the attempts to systematically organize and codify knowledge, exemplified by the works of the scholar-emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos.
Castelseprio was the site of a Roman fort in antiquity, and a significant Lombard town in the early Middle Ages, before being destroyed and abandoned in 1287. It is today preserved as an archaeological park in the modern comune of Castelseprio, near the modern village of the same name. It is in the north of Italy, in the Province of Varese, about 50 km northwest of Milan.
Insular art, also known as Hiberno-Saxon art, was produced in the post-Roman era of Great Britain and Ireland. The term derives from insula, the Latin term for "island"; in this period Britain and Ireland shared a largely common style different from that of the rest of Europe. Art historians usually group Insular art as part of the Migration Period art movement as well as Early Medieval Western art, and it is the combination of these two traditions that gives the style its special character.
The Leo Bible is a Byzantine illuminated manuscript dated to the mid 10th century, making it one of the earliest surviving Byzantine Bibles. Though only one volume survives, a preface and an intact contents page tell us that the Bible originally contained both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Due to its association with the Macedonian Renaissance it is often grouped along with the stylistically similar Paris Psalter and Joshua Roll.
The Hamilton Psalter is an illustrated manuscript that consists of Psalms 1-150 and twelve canonical Odes. It is most notable among Byzantine manuscripts due to being one of the few surviving bilingual manuscripts from the Byzantine era, written primarily in Greek and Latin. There’s no sole author of the manuscript but it’s in fact a compilation of multiple scribes' writing. Its name is derived from being a part of the Hamilton Collection, arranged to be purchased from Alexander Hamilton in 1882 by Wilhelm von Bode and Karl Friedrich Lippmann for the Royal Library in Berlin. It is currently housed within the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin.
Byzantine illuminated manuscripts were produced across the Byzantine Empire, some in monasteries but others in imperial or commercial workshops. Religious images or icons were made in Byzantine art in many different media: mosaics, paintings, small statues and illuminated manuscripts. Monasteries produced many of the illuminated manuscripts devoted to religious works using the illustrations to highlight specific parts of text, a saints' martyrdom for example, while others were used for devotional purposes similar to icons. These religious manuscripts were most commissioned by patrons and were used for private worship but also gifted to churches to be used in services.
