Manuscripts and bowls

Abt, Jeffrey and Margaret A. Fusco. “A Byzantine Scholar's Letter on the Preparation of Manuscript Vellum.”  Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 28, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), 61-66.

                This week’s blog will cover three articles instead of a portion Of a monograph due to the current status of Interlibrary Loan.  I decided to first focus on the medium on which the Byzantines wrote.  This first article is an original letter from a Byzantine head of a scriptorium to a monk instructing him to obtain parchment for creating manuscripts.  Planudes, the head of the scriptorium, was a famous theologian, rhetorician, and mathematician of Constantinople in the late 13^th and early 14^th century AD.  The monk, Melchisedek of Akropolita, received the letter in circa 1295.  Planudes was very precise in his instructions to Melchisedek. 

                This primary source is very important for three reasons.  First of all, it shows the materials and their quality that manuscript makers sought.  Secondly, it shows that some sort of egg finish was applied to parchment leaves.  Thirdly, the letter gives instruction on how to construct a manuscript (in this case a codex).  Planudes instructs Melchisedek to find fine (thin), clean leaves of parchment.  Planudes explains that this helps keep the manuscript to a manageable size and prevents the codex from bulging in the center and looking “pot-bellied.”  Planudes also cautions Melchisedek against purchasing or fabricating parchment with an egg finish.  This egg (white?) was often glazed over paintings and manuscripts to give them a glossy sheen.  Once water came into contact with this coating, the manuscript or artwork would begin to crack and flake.  Before closing with a veiled threat, Planudes also instructs Melchisedek how to compile parchment into a manuscript.  The simple explanation was that the manuscript maker was to purchase a full sheet of parchment and then fold this in half.  These folded leaves were then combined and bound together to form a codex (i.e. a book).  A variation on this technique was to fold a leaf of parchment into quarters (three folds) and cut along the top to make four smaller sheets out of the larger leaf.

Milliken, William M.  “Byzantine Manuscript Illumination.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34, No. 3 (Mar., 1947), 50-53.

                This short article concerns a portion of a Byzantine Gospel that was purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art.  The Gospel dates from circa 1057 to 1063 and once belonged to Empress Catherine Komnene, wife of Isaac Komnenos, before she donated it to a monastery following her husband’s abdication.  This article gives a very brief and broad overview of the development of illuminated (illustrated) manuscripts.  Milliken claims that the artistic innovations of using more realistic and more classical portrayals of humans and animals arose as a reaction against Iconoclasm.  While illumination of manuacripts has little to do with actual script, it shows the type of medium that scripts were written on.

Walker, Alicia.  “Classicizing Imagery and Islamicizing Script in a Byzantine Bowl.”  The Art Bulletin 90, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), 32-53. 

                 This article takes a single piece of Byzantine dinner ware from the eleventh century and elaborates on the interesting decorations and script found on its surface.  This bowl has classical imagery of people, possibly gods, and animals circumnavigating the exterior surface.  The interior lip has a pseudo-Islamic script.  The use of classical imagery, like the illuminated manuscripts mentioned above, is probably a reaction to the Iconoclasm a little over century prior to the bowl’s date.  I found the use of pseudo-Islamic script to be very interesting.  From my studies of Byzantine history, I knew that the Byzantine Empire began to “Islamicise” as the Ottoman Empire took away most of its territory, but I did not realize that Islamic decoration began to enter Byzantine artwork by the eleventh century, especially in Constantinople.  Despite the script on the inside of the bowl not being real Arabic, it still shows that portions of Islamic culture and art were already entering Byzantine culture.  This would later have an effect on their script.