In the Museo Diocesano e del Codex at Rossano, in Calabria, behind glass kept at a strict temperature, lies a book that most visitors read past: a square volume of parchment the colour of old wine, its pages carrying the Greek of the Gospels in letters that were once silver and are now, in places, indistinguishable from ordinary ink. The Gospel of Matthew survives in it entire, and nearly the whole of Mark; the book was made somewhere in the eastern Roman empire in the sixth century; and it arrived in a hill town of southern Italy long before anyone thought to write down when, or why, or by whose hands.
A Book of Purple Skins and Silver Letters
The measurements are given variously. The official historical notes of the codex describe the present shape as 300 by 250 millimetres; the Museo Diocesano e del Codex, which holds it, gives 307 by 260, and the Web Gallery of Art uses the same figure. What survives is 188 folios, 376 pages. The closing verses of Mark are the point of dispute: the museum’s own description says only verses 14 to 22 are missing, while the standard catalogues give 14 to 20. Either way the book ends a few verses short of the empty tomb.
The writing is what a sixth-century scribe would have called a biblical majuscule and what modern palaeographers call uncial. There are no accents and no breathings, no separation between words, and the letters run on in a single stream with the ancient high point used for punctuation. The text is laid out in two columns of twenty lines, which is a working layout rather than a display one, and tells you that this book was read and not merely shown. The museum’s description of the hand makes a claim about how the book was made rather than how it looks: the letters show the slow chronological development of the majuscule, and the sacral function the writing was expected to carry.
The inks are the reason for the fame. The body of the text is in silver; the title of each Gospel and the first three lines of its opening page are in gold. Schaff’s Encyclopaedia, drawing on the printed description of 1880, put the same fact more precisely: the codex is written on very fine purple vellum in silver letters, with the three first lines in both columns at the beginning of each Gospel in gold. The silver has not survived as silver. As the facsimile publisher Ziereis observes of the whole class of books written in gold and silver, silver inks today often appear black, having formed silver sulfide over the centuries, while the gold rarely loses its lustre.
The parchment is calfskin, and it was dyed purple before it was written on. Tyrian purple, made from the mucus of Mediterranean predatory snails, was the dye of emperors. The alternative was orchil, a dye extracted from lichen, cheaper and less prestigious. The non-invasive analysis of the Sinope Gospels, its close companion, found their purple to be orchil rather than the expected Tyrian purple, which quietly deflates the romance of the purple codices. Marina Bicchieri’s report on the measurement campaign of June 2012 to November 2013 shows that Raman spectroscopy, micro-FTIR and X-ray fluorescence characterised the pictorial palette, the inks and the support, and it reports the first experimental evidence of the use of elderberry lake in a sixth-century illuminated manuscript. What that campaign did not settle is whether the purple of the pages was snail or lichen.
The painted pages were made from a different stock. The official restoration notes are explicit: the miniatures were painted on thinner parchment than that used for the text, and a different purple was applied to it; opaque paints were chosen so that the image would not show through on the reverse. The illuminations and the text are therefore grouped together rather than interleaved. The codex was made up of quaternions of ten sheets, arranged according to Gregory’s law, each quire marked in the lower inner corner of the recto of its first leaf. The introductory quires, carrying the letter of Eusebius to Carpianus and the tables of the canon, are excluded from that numbering, and so are the final pages, 239 to 242, the last of which, page 241, carries the full-page portrait of Mark.
Two losses have to be recorded. The first is the binding: no sixth-century binding survives with the codex, the official catalogue does not describe the present one. The second loss is larger. The codex as it stands is about half of what it was: it began as a set, in one or two volumes, of the four Gospels preceded by an index of chapters, and a second volume is generally assumed to have held Luke and John, exactly the two books the official historical notes name as probably lost or destroyed. An eighteenth-century inventory of the cathedral sacristy spoke of some thirty Greek books, and the official account attributes the loss of most of them to the latinisation of the liturgy: the Greek books stopped being used, and books no longer used are not maintained. Its companion was not so lucky.
Twelve Scenes in Two Registers
The number of illuminations in the Rossano codex depends on what is being counted. The Diocesan Museum’s folio-by-folio presentation, the current authority, lists fourteen decorated pages: twelve scenes from the life of Christ, one title page for the Eusebian canon tables, and the full-page portrait of Mark. The Web Gallery of Art, working from the same book, speaks of the number of miniatures being reduced to fifteen pages, which it reaches by counting the communion of the apostles as two leaves rather than one subject. Schaff, writing in the 1880s, counted eighteen remarkable pictures in watercolour with forty figures of the prophets of the Old Testament.
What the museum’s list gives is the order of the book, and the order is the argument. The sequence runs from the raising of Lazarus through the entry into Jerusalem, the parable of the ten virgins, the last supper and the washing of the feet, the communion of the apostles and Christ in Gethsemane, to the healing of the blind man, the parable of the good Samaritan, the trial before Pilate and the choice between Jesus and Barabbas, ending with the portrait of Mark. The miniature cycle is arranged in two registers and reads as a continuous narrative rather than a set of independent illustrations. The Web Gallery of Art notes that the surviving cycle begins with the good Samaritan and ends with the release of Barabbas, which places the trial scenes near the end and the miracles near the beginning.
That commentary is explicit, and it does not rely on the pictures alone. Between the miniature and the Greek text beneath it, the Web Gallery of Art records that half-length portraits of four prophets have been interpolated, their legends announcing the event depicted above. The prophets are not decoration; they are exegetes. The book sets an Old Testament promise next to its New Testament fulfilment and lets the reader perform the comparison. The Sinope Gospels does the same thing with a different hand: its miniatures are set unframed at the foot of the page, and in the healing of the blind man the scene is flanked by David and Isaiah. Schaff’s count of forty prophet figures is a reminder that the codex is not a picture book with a text attached but a single composed argument in two registers of ink and pigment.
The entry into Jerusalem, on the second folio recto, is the one page most often reproduced, and it deserves describing. The Web Gallery of Art’s description catches the mingled registers of the image: on the right an abbreviated city, with inquisitive people straining from the windows in anticipation of the promised Messiah’s arrival, and a large number hastening out of the city gateway with palm leaves to meet Christ riding the ass. The iconography of the entry into Jerusalem was already so highly developed at this early date, the Web Gallery of Art notes, that its marriage of genre and ritual remained substantially unchanged for another thousand years. The Rossano painter fixed a formula the Western Middle Ages inherited almost unchanged, in a book made in Syria or Palestine in the 550s.
The trial scenes are the most striking, and the most discussed. Grokipedia’s account of the Rossano Gospels lays out what the artist chose to show, and the choices are unusual. Pilate is enthroned and commanding, surrounded by a semicircle of people, while Christ stands lower and to one side, in a subordinate position that distinguishes these miniatures from almost every other early treatment of the trial. The Rossano painter gives three acts and three interludes: the opening of the trial, with Christ’s silence as the focal point and the fate of Judas interpolated; the choice between Christ and Barabbas, with Herod as an interlude; and the washing of the hands, with the message of Pilate’s wife as an interlude. A rectangular inscription at the top of the page quotes Matthew 27:2. The point is theologically exact: the book is not interested in the governor’s absolution but in the judge’s refusal to speak, and the guileless Christ is the only still figure in the crowd.
Those unfocused eyes have produced the most persuasive argument about where the pictures came from. The Grokipedia entry observes that the crowd’s figures do not quite focus on the subject, suggesting that they held another position when they were first drawn, and that the whole of the trial composition, if a line is drawn around it, forms an arch, into which a model of an apse fits easily. The conclusion drawn from this is that the miniatures were derived from existing structures, that they are transcripts of murals or mosaics on the curved surfaces of sanctuary apses, and that the painters worked from a visual memory of church decoration rather than inventing a new stage. If that is right, the codex preserves the shapes of the walls of churches in the eastern Mediterranean in the sixth century, now otherwise lost.
The portrait of Mark, on page 241, closes the sequence and raises its own questions. Grokipedia describes two figures: Mark seated in a throne-like chair with his muse, Mary, as Divine Wisdom. The identification of the female figure is not secure. If she is the Virgin, the picture asserts the authority of the Gospel she commissioned; if she is a personification of Wisdom, the divine source of the text; if she is a living patron, the book as an object made for one person. The architecture around the pair is strikingly bare, two columns and an arch. The caption is in a different register of script again: the museum’s description of the hand notes that the majuscule used for the caption and for the roll the evangelist is writing on is very elementary and simple, an uncial that cannot be checked in any handmade book of late antiquity or the Middle Ages. The book, it seems, was written by people of more than one competence.
The two remaining decorated pages belong to the apparatus rather than to the narrative: the title page for the canon tables, whose circle is divided into sections that let a reader find parallel passages in the four Gospels, and the page carrying Eusebius’s letter to Carpianus. The letter is written in the same majuscule but in a soberer manner, the official description notes, and by the same hand as the Gospel text. The manuscript is therefore not a sum of parts but a graded one: a monumental text, a plainer scholarly apparatus, an economical caption script, and a painted cycle of the utmost technical sophistication. Any account of the codex that dates it by a single hand and a single year has to explain that hierarchy first.
Where the Book Was Made, and How It Reached Calabria
The place of origin is not settled, and the range of proposals is unusually wide. The Diocesan Museum states that the codex was created in a Byzantine scriptorium, in Syria according to the majority of scholars, and lists the alternatives: Antioch; Cappadocia or Ephesus; Alexandria; Constantinople. The Web Gallery of Art suggests that the entire decorative conception derives from the Syrian region, perhaps Antioch in particular, or the Palestinian area of Caesarea. Grokipedia’s account adds Kathleen Maxwell, who has argued for an imperial scriptorium in Constantinople. The official historical notes also record one dissenting chronology: Fernanda de Maffei of the University of Rome argued that the codex was made at Caesarea in Palestine and should be dated to the first half of the fifth century.
On the date, the consensus is broad but shallow. The Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Munster, the working reference of New Testament textual critics, dates the manuscript to the sixth century. The Web Gallery of Art places it in the middle of that century, dating the whole purple group on the style of the miniatures. J. Rendel Harris, writing in The Sunday School Times in October 1886, put a serious question against all of these. Of the sixteen uncial manuscripts then supposed to belong to the sixth or seventh century, twelve are now usually attributed to the earlier period, and he doubted the sixth-century date assigned to the Rossano codex. His warning applies to every purple codex: in books written for imperial use there is always an artificial tone of antiquity in the writing. The dating of the Rossano text and the dating of its pictures are two questions, and the evidence for the first is not the evidence for the second.
What can be compared securely is the group. The Web Gallery of Art names the Vienna Genesis, the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis and the Codex Sinopensis as a related group of mid-sixth-century manuscripts on purple-dyed parchment, dated on the style of the miniatures. The Sinope Gospels, designated O or 023, survive in forty-four folios at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and were bought at Sinope on the Black Sea in 1899 by a French officer from an old Greek woman; their style points to Syria or Palestine, and even Mesopotamia. All three are now dispersed, one each in Vienna, Paris and Calabria, and the dispersal is the strongest evidence for the original concentration.
The Purple Uncials are the sixth-century Greek manuscripts on purple-dyed parchment: the Petropolitanus Purpureus (N), the Sinope Gospels (O), the Rossano Gospels (Sigma) and the Beratinus (Phi), along with Uncial 080. Purple parchment was the support of luxury, and its use in a manuscript of this size implied an institution wealthy enough to buy the skins, the dye, the silver and the gold, and to pay a scribe and a painter. Grokipedia’s survey of purple parchment notes that the practice was supposed to be restricted to Roman and Byzantine emperors, and records Saint Jerome’s scorn in 384 for the wealthy Christian women whose books were written in gold on purple vellum and clothed with gems. That is the world the Rossano codex was made in: a world in which the colour of a page was a claim about authority.
The comparison usually made with this book is with the Carolingian court, and it runs in the opposite direction from the one usually assumed. The Carolingian books were not made in the style of Rossano. They were made three centuries later, in deliberate imitation of a sixth-century luxury form they knew only from reputation. Grokipedia’s survey of purple parchment records that the practice was revived for especially grand manuscripts produced for emperors in Carolingian and Ottonian art and in England. The Ziereis facsimile catalogue shows what the revival looked like: the Coronation Gospels of the Holy Roman Empire were written in gold ink on purple parchment at the court school of Charlemagne in Aachen shortly before 800, and each German emperor swore his oath with his hand on the book.
The Munich book is the one usually paired with Rossano. Grokipedia’s entry on the Codex Aureus of Saint Emmeram describes a Gospel book made for Charles the Bald in 870, written by the monks Liuthard and Beringer, with seven full-page miniatures, including the four evangelists and Christ in Majesty. Its text is written in golden uncial letters with every page framed, on what the Ziereis catalogue calls extremely expensive violet parchment. It measures 420 by 330 millimetres and has 126 vellum folios, making it a bigger book than Rossano, and its cover is a treasure binding of gold set with sapphires and pearls. Charles gave the book to Arnulf of Carinthia, who presented it to the abbey of St Emmeram at Regensburg; it passed to the Bavarian State Library on the secularisation of 1811, where it remains as Clm 14000. The Lorsch Gospels, for its part, was written in Latin between 778 and 820, and was recorded in the catalogue of Lorsch Abbey compiled in 830 under Abbot Adelung as a gospel book written with gold and having ivory tablets; it was broken in two during the Thirty Years’ War, so that Matthew and Mark now sit in Alba Iulia, Luke and John in the Vatican, and the front ivory cover in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Set beside each other, the two books show the difference between a sixth-century Byzantine scribe and a ninth-century Frankish one. Rossano offers a narrative cycle in two registers, a single evangelist portrait, prophets interleaved with the text; Munich offers framed pages in golden uncial, a fixed programme of seven full-page images and a portrait of its patron. The two share purple parchment, metal ink, a gospel book format, canon tables and evangelist portraits. The direction of resemblance, however, is not in doubt: the Carolingian books are the ones in the antique idiom. Whatever relation exists between them and Rossano is one of model and revival, in which a book made in the 550s supplied the idea of what a Gospel book could look like, and a book made in 870 at Saint-Denis supplied the model for what an emperor’s book should be. The question of whether the two belong to a single series of luxury manuscripts therefore has a clean answer in the chronology and a more interesting one in the aesthetics: they belong to one tradition of what a sacred book should be, and they are three centuries apart.
There is a closer parallel, and it was found two years after Rossano. In 1881, as Harris recorded in 1886, the Abbé Duchesne published in Paris’s Bulletin Critique the announcement of a manuscript that, like the Rossanensis, contained Matthew and Mark in silver letters on purple parchment. It belongs to the church of St George in Berat in Albania and is known as the Codex Beratinus. Harris called it a lion, and noted that among the other manuscripts Batiffol had described at Berat were a liturgy written in silver letters on a long roll of purple parchment, and a tenth-century Gospel book in gold letters on purple parchment. Berat and Rossano are not a matched pair from one workshop; they are two survivors of a class. Harris put the size of that class in a sentence that still holds: uncial manuscripts of the sixth century, in imperial purple and with gold or silver ink, are so rare that they can be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.
The Greek Text and Its Apparatus
What the codex contains is a little more than the two Gospels, and the extra material is what makes it useful to a critic. The codex carries the Epistle of Eusebius to Carpianus, the letter in which Eusebius explains the principle of the canon tables and addresses Carpianus on the organisation of the Gospel material. Before each Gospel are the kephalaia, the chapter lists. At the top of the pages run the titloi, the titles giving the subject of the passage. In the margins are the numbers of the Ammonian Sections, the divisions of the Gospel text into sections numbered from Ammonius of Alexandria, and the references to the Eusebian Canons, the ten tables that set the four Gospels in parallel. The apparatus of the book is an apparatus of concordance, designed for a community that read the Gospels comparatively, across the year, in the manner of a lectionary.
The text itself is Byzantine. Grokipedia’s account of the Rossano Gospels states the position plainly and gives the reason for the grouping: the text is a representative of the Byzantine text-type in close relationship to the Codex Petropolitanus Purpureus, and Rossano together with the Petropolitanus Purpureus, the Sinope Gospels and the Beratinus make up the group known as the Purple Uncials. Kurt Aland placed all four manuscripts of the group in Category V, the category reserved for manuscripts with a purely or predominantly Byzantine text. Schaff’s summary of the codex put the same thing in a single clause: the text, as well as the writing, resembles that of Codex N of the Gospels. A book written in the sixth century that already carries a recognisably Byzantine text is a fixed point in the history of the text, not a curiosity attached to it.
The readings are worth a sample, because they show what a purple codex can do to the text that an ordinary one cannot. At Matthew 1:11, the genealogy of Jesus, the Rossano text reads, ‘Joakim, Joakim fathered’, a doubled name that the majority of manuscripts omit and that Rossano shares with Codex Campianus, Codex Nanianus, the Koridethi codex, the Family 1 group, and a long list of later minuscules including 33, 258, 478, 661, 954, 1216, 1230, 1354 and 1604. At Matthew 23:25, the woe against the scribes and Pharisees, Rossano reads ‘uncleanness’ where the majority reads ‘self-indulgence’, a reading it shares with the Latin Vulgate and with Syriac and Coptic witnesses. A book made for display, in gold and silver, on purple, for the most exalted reader in the Byzantine world, turns out to preserve a text with fingerprints on it.
The reception, however, was mixed, and the mixedness is instructive. J. Rendel Harris recalled that when the text of the Rossanensis was published there was a feeling of disappointment at its ordinary character. It had few of the prominent features of those manuscripts to which Dr Hort had given the titles Neutral, Western, or Alexandrine in the text. Sanday, Harris recorded, went so far as to say that it was a codex after the heart of the Dean of Chichester, an epigram which, Harris thought, Dean Burgon would take as a compliment to his critical judgement rather than as a detraction. Sanday’s own study of the text had appeared in 1885 in the first volume of Studia Biblica, and it is still the standard treatment. A codex whose text is ordinary is not the kind of witness that overturns anything. What the Rossano codex offers is not novelty but range: an ancient witness, a peculiar physical form, and the standard Byzantine text as it stood in the sixth century, which is much rarer to possess than a manuscript with an eccentric reading. Gebhardt and Harnack had made the book available to scholarship in the first place, publishing the text with a facsimile in 1883 in the Texte und Untersuchungen series.
The point about how such books were transmitted is the one Harris made about the script. A purple codex was a prestige object, and prestige objects are copied as models, sometimes long after the model has ceased to be the best witness. Jerome’s complaint, that books written in gold on purple vellum and clothed with gems were the property of wealthy women, tells you what the books were for, and that display competed with text from the start. That is a caution about the handwriting and about the decoration: a painter working in a scriptorium that valued antique models may have produced a cycle whose manner is earlier than its execution.
The Men Who Brought It Back to Light
For a thousand years or more the codex was simply one of the cathedral’s treasures. The official historical notes put it plainly: the codex has counted itself since time immemorial among the goods of the cathedral and the town archbishopric. The diocese of Rossano was raised to the rank of an archdiocese in 1085 by Earl Roger, in exchange for submission to Rome, and the Greek rite was practised there until about 1462. The codex sat in the sacristy of the cathedral of Santa Maria Achiropita for centuries as a working liturgical book in the Greek. The written record is remarkably thin.
The first firm notice is of 1831, when Scipione Camporota, a canon of the cathedral, handled the codex and reordered and numbered the illuminations with a pen. A few years later the Neapolitan journalist and historian Cesare Malpica mentioned it in print, in 1845 according to the museum and 1846 according to the official historical notes. Camporota’s ink is still on the pages. It is the first physical evidence that anyone in modern times had taken the book in hand and looked at it closely, and a reminder that the rediscovery of the codex was not the finding of a lost object but the beginning of the study of a neglected one.
The story of the European discovery is told by McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopaedia, and it begins with a dead end. In the spring of 1879 two German scholars, Oscar von Gebhardt of Gottingen and Adolf Harnack of Giessen, travelled into Italy in search of manuscripts. They were following a notice in which Paul Lagarde had drawn attention to a sixteenth-century report that manuscripts of Cyril of Jerusalem, Dionysius of Alexandria and Hippolytus were kept in the monastery of Santa Maria de lo Patire near Rossano. The monastery had long since perished, and of these writings the two men could hear nothing. But they were told that there was a very old biblical book in the archiepiscopal palace, and they begged to be allowed to look at it. Ushered into the presence of the archbishop, monsignor Pietro Cilento, they beheld, to their astonishment and delight, a quarto volume of the gospels, written in silver, on purple parchment, in old Greek uncial letters, unaccented, the words unseparated, and at the beginning a number of admirably drawn and coloured miniatures and historical pictures. It was, the Cyclopaedia concluded, the property of the chapter of the cathedral church of Rossano.
The manuscript was published in Leipzig in 1880 under the name it has carried ever since, Evangeliorum codex Graecus purpureus Rossanensis, and Oskar von Gebhardt’s full edition of the text, with facsimile and outline sketches of the miniatures, appeared in 1883 as a volume in the Texte und Untersuchungen series. The name stuck because it was exact: a codex written in letters of gold and silver on purple parchment, nowise called by the place where it had surfaced. In October 1886 J. Rendel Harris was writing about it in The Sunday School Times. The same article records that the discovery was immediately followed by another, the parallel manuscript from Berat, published by Duchesne in 1881, which reinforced the impression that a category had been found.
Then came the twentieth century’s damage. The only restoration before the present one was carried out in 1919 by Nestore Leoni, and the museum’s account of it is blunt. The late nineteenth-century treatment consolidated and stretched the parchment using hot jelly, making it irreversibly transparent. It was applied only to the pages of the first booklet containing the illuminations, with a different procedure at the end of the codex, where a silk veil was used instead.
On 18 October 1952 it was transferred to the Diocesan Museum of Holy Art, where it remained for a century. Then it moved again, this time to the Istituto di Conservazione e Restauro del Patrimonio Archivistico e Librario in Rome, under the direction of Maria Cristina Misisti, for a long and needy restoration work conducted with modern and scientific criteria. The reasons given for the move are not trivial: the codex had been exposed during liturgical celebrations in the museum, and its condition had become precarious. The campaign that followed, between June 2012 and November 2013, was deliberately non-invasive. X-ray fluorescence, fibre-optic reflectance spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy were used to map the chemical elements in the pictorial media, the inks and the support, and to identify the materials used in 1919; no samples were taken. Marina Bicchieri’s report on that work is the reason the elderberry lake is now on the record for a sixth-century illuminated manuscript.
Meanwhile the book’s status was changing faster than its condition. On 14 November 2013 the codex was exhibited at the Quirinale during the visit of Pope Francis to the Italian president, an idea that had arisen during the Memory of the World nomination campaign. The nomination had been begun by Archbishop Santo Marciano in January 2007 and had gone nowhere for years until the UNESCO ambassador Lucio Alberto Savoia called the archbishop in to advise him; the form was written by Father Nando Ciliberti with the iconographic material assembled by Michele Abastante, and it was supported by a letter of advocacy from Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi and others. On 17 June 2015 the sub-committee gave its consent, and on 9 October 2015 the international committee inscribed the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis in the Memory of the World Register in Abu Dhabi.
What Is Still Debated
Set out like this, the codex looks like a solved object, and it is worth listing the questions that remain open, because they are what make it interesting rather than what make it valuable in a display case. Where was it made? The candidates are Antioch, Caesarea, Constantinople, Alexandria, Ephesus and Cappadocia. When was it made? Sixth century for the consensus, the first half of the fifth for de Maffei, with Harris’s warning that the script of a purple book is always a little theatrical. How did it reach Calabria? The official museum offers two accounts: that it came in the seventh or eighth century with the Basilian monks driven from the eastern Mediterranean by the iconoclast persecutions; or that it arrived when Rossano became a diocese in the tenth century. Both accounts fit the evidence that survives, which is why neither has won.
There is also the question of whether the text and the pictures are of the same moment, and the evidence that they are not identical in execution is internal. The Gospel text is written in a monumental majuscule with heavy chiaroscuro; the letter of Eusebius in the same script but plainer and smaller; the caption to Mark’s portrait in a majuscule so elementary that the museum’s catalogue can find no parallel for it in late antique or medieval book hands; and the picture cycle, painted on a different and thinner stock of parchment, with a different and more expensive purple.
There is the second volume, which held Luke and John, and which probably died in the latinisation of the eighteenth century along with many other Greek books of the cathedral sacristy. Its absence is the reason the codex’s narrative cycle stops at the trial rather than at the empty tomb, and the reason the Mark portrait comes last, with a full page between the reader and the text it introduces. And there is the dye, which has not yet told us whether the skins were coloured with the snail of the Mediterranean or with a lichen from the hills, a question that decides whether these pages were an imperial commission or the work of a wealthy and pious institution.
What the codex is, in the end, is the intersection of four things that are usually kept apart. It is a text: an ordinary Byzantine Gospel text, carrying the apparatus of Eusebius and Ammonius, interesting less for its readings than for being so unremarkable and so early. It is a material: calfskin dyed purple, written in silver and gold, painted on a second and thinner stock of leather so that the pictures would not print through on the back of the leaf. It is a decoration: a narrative cycle in two registers, illustrated by prophets, interrupted by the trial of Christ before Pilate, and closed by an evangelist and his muse. And it is a journey, from a scriptorium somewhere in the eastern empire to a monastery in southern Italy, to a cathedral sacristy, to a museum, to a laboratory in Rome, to a display case in Abu Dhabi. A text alone would be a file. A material alone would be a curiosity. What the Rossano codex offers is the demonstration that these were once the same object.
References
- The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, folio by folio – Diocesan Museum, Rossano
- Historical notes on the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – Diocesan Museum, Rossano
- The restoration of the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – Diocesan Museum, Rossano
- The nomination of the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis for the Memory of the World Register – Diocesan Museum, Rossano
- The Codex – Museo Diocesano e del Codex, Rossano Calabro
- GA 042, Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, manuscript record – Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Munster
- Rossano Gospels – Grokipedia
- Purple parchment – Grokipedia
- Sinope Gospels – Grokipedia
- Codex Aureus of Saint Emmeram – Grokipedia
- Codex Aureus of Lorsch – Grokipedia
- Rossanian Manuscript – James Strong and John McClintock, Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, 1880
- Autumn, 1886: A recently discovered New Testament manuscript – J. Rendel Harris, The Sunday School Times, Philadelphia, 23 October 1886, translated by Enik Pogace and reprinted by KOHA.net
- Bible Text, on the history of the written text – Philip Schaff, Encyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
- Codex Purpureus Rossanensis (Rossano Gospels) – Web Gallery of Art
- The purple Codex Rossanensis: spectroscopic characterization and first evidence of the use of the elderberry lake in a 6th century manuscript – Marina Bicchieri, arXiv, 2014
- Die Evangelien des Matthaeus und des Marcus aus dem Codex purpureus Rossanensis – Oscar von Gebhardt, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1883
- The Text of the Codex Rossanensis, in Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica, volume 1 – William Sanday, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885
- Facsimile Editions: Written in Gold and Silver – Ziereis Facsimiles, Regensburg