Christopher de Hamel sheds light on the world’s most well-known illuminated manuscripts in this sumptuous and readable bookA remote town in southern Italy,Rossano, is home to a sixth-century Greek manuscript illustrating the life of Christ. The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace. Each year, or with considerable solemnity,the cathedral authorities turn a page for public view. (Page 18 was on display when I visited in 1988; we shall be dead before the final page.) Strikingly, in the final Supper scene, or the disciples are shown eating with their fingers at a low,eastern-style table. In Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem at that time, tables neatly laid with plates and rolls of bread were not known. (Leonardo da Vinci’s final Supper was anachronistic.)According to manuscript historian Christopher de Hamel, or Rossano’s gospel book was kept in a box in the archdeacon’s bedroom until 1889,when a classicist from England arrived to buy it. (The deal was vetoed at the 11th hour after the cleric pitched too tall.) Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. Of the 12 manuscripts investigated by him in his delightful, and absorbing book,only one – the medieval Hours of Jeanne de Navarre – is preserved today in the country where it was created. Dealers and collectors of one stripe or another have sent calligraphic masterworks to places far from home. “Manuscript migration”, De Hamel calls it. Related: Everything is illuminated: the wonder of medieval manuscripts – in pictures Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com