Ο κώδικας 590 της μονής Βατοπεδίου : Ένα αντίγραφο του Ιώβ της Πάτμου
Part of : Δελτίον της Χριστιανικής Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας ; Vol.31, 1988, pages 17-38
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17-38
Parallel Title:
Codex Vatopedi 590 : A Copy of the Patmos Codex of Job
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Articles
Abstract:
This article is the fruit of a research project on the illumination of Byzantine manuscripts of the Book of Job, which is the subject of the author's doctoral dissertation. The main aims of the article are to present a relatively detailed analysis of the internal relationship between the famous codex Patmos 171 and the manuscript Vatopedi 590, and to define that relationship as precisely as possible. Both manuscripts contain the Book of Job with commentary, and both are illuminated. The date of the Patmos codex has long been a matter of dispute among art historians and palaeographers alike. The dates suggested for it have ranged from the 7th-8th centuries to the lOth-llth centuries, with the ninth century now apparently gaining general acceptance. The Vatopedi codex is usually dated to the 12th-13th centuries on palaeographic evidence alone. The Patmos codex, written in uncials, preserves thirty-nine miniatures. Two of these (on pages 449 and 450) are full-page; the remainder are all at the bottom of the page, though they vary in size and type. Broadly speaking, they can be divided into two main groups corresponding to the two parts of the book: the socalled 'prologue' (the first two chapters) and the rest. The miniatures in the first group are fully-integrated compositions with frames and are painted on a blue ground; the others are unframed, are painted straight on the parchment and lack internal homogeneity. In the Vatopedi codex, all forty-eight of the original miniatures have survived intact. They are all unframed and painted straight on the parchment. With the exception of four full-page illustrations, all are miniatures in the text. Their principal common feature is their poor artistic quality. The conclusions reached in this are based chiefly on a comparative study of the two cycles of miniatures, taking into account the choice of the passages to be illustrated, the choise of subject for the respective miniatures, the iconographie and stylistic rendering of the illustrations. Certain textual observations on the two codices are cited as supplementary evidence. First of all, comparison of the passages chosen for illumination in the two codices yielded the following findings. All except three of the illustrations in the Patmos MS are matched in the Vatopedi MS, while the latter has twelve that do not appear in the former (see Table I). Careful examination of the places in the text where these discrepancies occur revealed that the lacunae in the Patmos MS are due to accidental loss, or, in some (perhaps many) cases, deliberate removal of leaves. This last is confirmed by the fact that some miniatures have survived in mutilated form. The lacunae in the Vatopedi codex, on the other hand, are of primary origin: the first is due to the copyist's inadvertent failure to leave space for the illumination in the text, while the other two may have been deliberate omissions. The conclusions to be drawn from these findings are as follows. The number and choice of passages to be illustrated was originally almost exactly the same in both codices, and the content and iconography of each individual miniature was likewise almost identical. This parallelism clearly indicates the close relationship between the two codices, especially in the case of miniatures which contain iconographie peculiarities not found in any of the other illustrated manuscripts of the Book of Job. Here, however, it must be said that the illuminations in the Vatopedi MS are not exact replicas of their originals. The undeniable mediocrity of the painter responsible for them is apparent not only in his crude and clumsy draughtsmanship and his inartistic handling of colour, but also in the difficulty he obviously had in adapting the subject matter of his models to a different format. Not only does he oversimplify, but frequently he also abbreviates the more complex designs of the original, while those features that he does retain he makes every effort to reproduce as faithfully as possible. At the same time, however, these very weaknesses of the illuminator of the Vatopedi MS, if read correctly, do help us to arrive at further conclusions. For example, careful examination of the miniatures of the Vatopedi MS reveals that they too can be divided stylistically into two groups which reflect —albeit faintly, beneath the naïveté and crudeness of their workmanship— the salient features of the corresponding stylistic groups of their originals. The conclusions drawn from the study of the overall illustrative scheme and the iconography and style of the individual illuminations all point in the same direction, leaving no room for doubt as to the close connection between the two manuscripts under consideration. The question that naturally arises, namely whether the set of illuminations in the Patmos MS served as the direct model for the Vatopedi set, can be definitively answered by comparing the texts of the two codices from the point of view of their content as well as their purely linguistic features. Taking the question of content first, we find that the Vatopedi MS contains a commentary of a type that was no longer in use at the time when it was written, the type found in the Sylloge of Olympiodorus (Type 1 in Lietzmann's classification); but it combines this with the long-established Textkatenen system of textual layout, whereby the original (Biblical) text and the scholia are put in a single column. Clearly the copyist was following current practice (which was both easier and more economical) as regards the layout of the page, but as regards the form of the commentary he was following a manuscript dating from before 1100, when the Sylloge Scholiorum of Niketas of Heraclea was introduced. What could be more natural than that that manuscript should be the Patmos codex, which has the same type of commentary and is so closely related in the matter of its illuminations? Should any lingering doubts remain as to the direct derivation of the Vatopedi MS from that of Patmos, they are dispelled by the linguistic evidence. The linguistic comparison of the two texts was done by sampling; nevertheless, it provides ample evidence to corroborate the conclusion that the former was copied from the latter. The final conclusion reached in this paper, namely that the miniatures of Vatopedi 590 were copied directly from Patmos 171, would not perhaps be so significant if the original set of illuminations in the Patmos MS had survived intact. As this is not the case, the only way its lacunae can be filled in, at least at present, is by reference to the Vatopedi MS. One last point concerns the location of the scriptorium where Vatopedi 590 was written. This must have been in the Monastery of St. John on Patmos, which is known to have had MS Patmos 171 in its possession from 1201
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