Commented Books of 16 Prophets

by Kirill Orlov

Description

The manuscript is written in a single hand — Moscow semi-uncial (“poluustav”) — but elements of Greek and Bulgarian script are noticeable in the writing, which speaks to the education of a scribe at the end of the 15th century and the existence of a certain intellectual fashion of the time.

The compilation of the manuscript is distinguished by the complex organization of the production process. Miniatures, headpieces, initials, and the text itself were created not sequentially, but in parallel in different places. The pages with miniatures were inserted after the scribe had finished his work, while the headpieces sometimes appeared even before the text was written.

The miniatures of the prophets were created by separate artists, as confirmed by the scribe’s surviving instructions, such as notes like “paint Zachariah here”. In total, the manuscript includes 16 miniatures, 16 initials, and 16 headpieces, but the quality and style of these elements are not uniform: researchers identify four to seven masters who worked on different parts of the book.

The colophon of the manuscript reproduces the one dating back to the earliest, lost copy of the Book of the Sixteen Prophets. Thanks to this colophon, we know the name of the Old Russian scribe Upyr Likhoi, who probably created one of the first copies of this book in Novgorod in 1047. To this day, this lost document remains the oldest dated Cyrillic monument and the scribe Likhoi is the oldest known scribe of Kievan Rus’.

This colophon was subsequently reproduced many times in manuscripts, including later versions of the Book of Prophets from the 15th century. It even appeared in the Gennady’s Bible of 1499 — the first complete version of the Bible in Russia — in its original place, after the Book of Daniel. It is also interesting that in the manuscript of 1489 the ancient colophon was added much later, only in the 19th century.

An important feature of the 1489 manuscript is another inscription revealing the name of the person who commissioned the book. For a long time, researchers believed that the name of the scribe was hidden in the scratched inscription, but in the 1970s, they finally managed to restore the inscription in its entirety and refute this theory.

The customer of the manuscript turned out to be Moscow clerk (dyak) Vasili Mamyrev, a prominent figure of the era of Ivan III, a participant in the annexation of Novgorod, a diplomat, and, probably, the keeper of the sovereign’s treasury. Mamyrev was known not only for his political activities, but also as a man of letters. He spoke several languages, copied books himself, and had a rich library. For example, the oldest Russian travelogue, Afanasy Nikitin’s “A Journey Beyond The Three Seas”, comes from Mamyrev’s library. Moreover, his death was even mentioned in one of the chronicles — a unique case for non-royal persons.

Why Mamyrev’s name was later scratched out in the colophon remains an unexplained mystery of the manuscript. What we know for sure is that shortly after the book was created, Mamyrev died, having taken monastic vows. Apparently, it was illness and approaching death that prompted the clerk to order a richly decorated Books of Prophets for himself. This circumstance would also explain the somewhat hasty and disorganized work on the manuscript.

Historical Context

The creation of the first known illustrated “Books of the Prophets” in 1489 is linked to the important spiritual and cultural context of the late 15th century in Russia. At that time, eschatological tension was growing in society, caused by the approach of the year 7000 since the creation of the world (1492 AD), which in the widespread historiosophical tradition was perceived as a possible turning point at the end of time.

This explains the noticeable surge of interest in prophetic texts and their interpretations at the end of the 15th century. While we know of almost no Cyrillic Books of Prophets prior to this time, at least 40 have survived from the second half of the 15th century.

Another important background to the era was the state policy of Ivan III, aimed at gathering Russian lands and forming a unified centralized state. It was during his reign that Moscow finally secured its status as the political and cultural center of Russia.

Large-scale diplomatic and military projects, the subjugation of independent Novgorod, and the elimination of fragmentation were accompanied by an intensification of book production and an increase in the cultural ambitions of the court. Against this backdrop, scriptoria developed rapidly, the grand ducal court’s library expanded, and craftsmen worked, drawing on both Byzantine models, different regional traditions and Western European innovations.

Translation

It is worth mentioning the peculiarities of the manuscript’s translation. The first thing that catches the eye is the order of the books of the prophets in the manuscript — first the “minor” ones, then the four “major” ones — which corresponds to the Greek Septuagint rather than the Latin Vulgate. In fact, the translation basis of the text goes back to the ancient tradition of Cyril and Methodius, which came to Kievan Rus’ through the rich Bulgarian literary environment of the 9th–10th centuries.

It is believed that the first attempt at a partial translation belongs to Cyril himself, as the compiler of Slavic liturgical books (paremiynik). It is assumed that the original protograph of 1047 was translated from Glagolitic into Cyrillic from another, truly complete translation of the prophetic books, made by an unknown Bulgarian scribe at the turn of the 9th and 10th centuries. There is one curious feature of this translation that is also present in the later list of 1489.

The Bulgarian translator used the less common type of Greek text — the Alexandrian rather than the Constantinopolitan version of the Septuagint, which in itself is quite unusual. In doing so, the translator clearly relied on St. Cyril’s early fragmentary translation. As a result, a small error crept into the text of the Book of Daniel: the line “Praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” accidentally found its way into the third chapter — a liturgical formula that has no connection with the Old Testament text and found its way into it as a result of mechanical transfer from the liturgical canon.

Iconography and decoration

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The second group is the “Dionisian” group, represented by the prophets Hosea, Joel, Malachi, Habakkuk, Zechariah, and Daniel. These miniatures demonstrate the subtlety of the poses, the elegance of the folds, and the complex color scheme, which corresponds to the paintings of the Ferapontov Monastery, the icons of the Kirillov Monastery, and the altar screen of the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin.

The compositions lean toward the late style of Dionisius, the most important Russian icon painter and fresco master of his era. Some researchers have attempted to attribute at least some of the illustrations to Dionysius himself or his son Theodosius, but it is much more likely that this manuscript was worked on by masters who were simply well acquainted with the manner of the great artist. The heterogeneity of style is also emphasized by exceptions: for example, the prophet Habakkuk is clearly executed by a less confident hand.

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The “pozem”, a decorative background used in a number of miniatures, deserves special attention. Researchers note that the type of “pozem” found in the 1489 manuscript is traditionally associated with the Novgorod school of art. At the same time, there is a hypothesis that the ornamental elements of it may date back to the visual use of Glagolitic forms in the Bulgarian environment, where two alphabets were used simultaneously at some point.

However, this theory remains highly controversial: there is no direct evidence of a connection between Glagolitic graphics and the development of ornamental “pozem”, and most scholars tend to view such parallels as distant analogies rather than a stable tradition. Anyway, the “Novgorod” pozem in the Moscow manuscript differs somewhat from the Novgorod examples themselves, which may indicate that the artists were only superficially familiar with this type of ornamentation.

As for the headpieces, 15 of them can be divided into two groups: Balkan-Neo-Byzantine ornaments and headpieces influenced by Western European engravings. While the former are fairly standard examples, the latter are unique in their own way. This is apparently the first known case of European engravings being used in Russia, which is particularly noteworthy given that the technique of metal engraving appeared shortly before the manuscript was created.

Nevertheless, some of the first examples were already present in Moscow scriptorias in the 1480s. The headpiece on folio 36r attracts particular attention with its iconography featuring angels, which is atypical for Russia. In reality, it is a distorted copy of the engraving “Madonna with Ornament” by a German artist known as the Master of the Berlin Passion, one of the earliest major engraving masters in Europe.

A less obvious example could be found on folio 82r. It is quite possible that this is an interpretation of ornamental plant engravings by another early German artist known by the initials ES. However, even in the absence of real prototypes, one cannot fail to notice the influence of engraving on the manner of the artists of this group of headpieces, which clearly imitates engraved strokes.

A special place in the manuscript is occupied by the headpiece with four beasts and the preceding image of Daniel in the lions’ den. The image of the prophet stands out sharply from the other portraits, both in terms of its compositional solution and its execution. Unlike the other prophets, who are depicted as full-length figures with scrolls, in the Byzantine style, Daniel is shown in a scene from his life, thus illustrating the text.

The image was probably made by two masters: the figure of Daniel himself clearly belongs to the brush of an artist from the “Dionisian” group, while the lions and elements of the landscape are stylistically closer to the “watercolor” manner of another group of masters. This division of labor within a single miniature highlights the complexity and heterogeneity of the artistic process characteristic of the entire manuscript.

The next image after this one, depicting four apocalyptic beasts from the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, occupies a special place in both the artistic and theological structure of the manuscript. The story of the four beasts was directly related to the eschatological expectations of the year 7000. This vision of the four kingdoms was perceived by contemporaries as a prophecy of the approaching end of time, and therefore the inclusion of such a detailed and vivid headpiece in the manuscript reflects the general spiritual climate of the era and the heightened interest in apocalyptic motifs.

However, the most significant thing is that this headpiece was created by the same artist who created Daniel’s miniature, meaning that they were originally conceived as a single visual complex decorating the spread. Such a solution is extremely unusual for the Russian book tradition of the 15th century and earlier. Usually, headpieces are strictly separated from full-page illustrations, they represent either abstract ornamentation or, in rare cases, a portrait of the author (for example, an evangelist).

An illustrative frontispiece that directly continues the plot of the previous image is practically unknown in other manuscripts of the era. Moreover, their connection is reinforced by the content of the scroll in Daniel’s hands, which contains the entire second verse of the seventh chapter: “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me were the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea. Four great beasts, each different from the others, came up out of the sea”.

The scene “in the den” emphasizes the prophet’s personal story, while the headpiece with the beasts immediately sends the viewer from the narrative level to the level of prophetic revelation. Interestingly, the depiction of the four beasts in the manuscript does not strictly correspond to the details of the text, but their iconography is almost identical to the surviving paintings by Dionisius in the Ferapontov Monastery.

Although the story of Daniel taming the lions and his vision of the four kingdoms follow each other in the biblical text, their artistic combination on a single spread is surprisingly rare. A few isolated examples do not represent a stable tradition. The 1489 manuscript is probably one of the first and most expressive examples of such a juxtaposition, reflecting both the eschatological expectations of the time and the artistic experiments of Moscow masters at the turn of the 15th century.

Bibliography

• Alekhina L. I. (ed.) Knigi prorokov. Litsevaia rukopis’ 1489 goda: [Katalog vystavki] (“Books of the Prophets: An illuminated manuscript from 1489 [Exhibition Catalog]”). Moscow, The Central Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art Publ., 2020, 95 p. (in Russian).
• Evseev, I.E. (1905) Kniga proroka Daniila v drevne-slavjanskom perevode: Vvedenie i teksty [“The Book of the Prophet Daniel in Old Slavonic Translation: Introduction and texts”]. Moscow, 1905 (in Russian).
• Kuchkin V. A., Popov G. V. (1974) Gosudarev d’yak Vasiliy Mamyrev i litsevaya Kniga prorokov 1489 goda [“Grand Duke’s clerk Vasily Mamyrev and the illuminated Prophet book of 1489”] in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo: Rukopisnaya kniga [“Old-Russian art: Handwritten book”], vol. 2., Moscow, 1974, pp. 107–144 (in Russian).
• Lowden J. (1988) Illuminated Prophet Books. London, 1988.
• Morozova E. N. (2018) Revisiting the miniatures of the Prophet book dated back to 1489. Vestnik Pravoslavnogo Sviato-Tikhonovskogo gumanitarnogo universiteta. Seriia V: Voprosy istorii i teorii khristianskogo iskusstva (“St. Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University Review”. Series 5. “Problems of History and Theory of Christian Art”), 2018, no. 31, pp. 32–52 (in Russian).
• Nemirovskiy E.L. (1964) Vozniknovenie knigipechataniya v Moskve: Ivan Fedorov [“Beginning of book-printing in Moscow: Ivan Fedorov”]. Moscow, 1964 (in Russian).
• Popov G. V. (2009) Rukopisnaya kniga Moskvy. Miniatyura i ornament vtoroy poloviny XV–XVI stoletiya [“Moscow hand-written books. Miniatures and ornaments of the second half of the 15th – 16th cc.”]. Moscow, 2009 (in Russian).

Image sources

• Russian State Library: https://rsl.ru
• Vatican Library Digital: https://digi.vatlib.it/
• Christianity in Art: https://www.icon-art.info/
• The British Museum: https://www.britishmuseum.org/
• Dresden State Art Collections: https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/
• Heidelberg Digital Library: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/
• The Memory of Paper: https://memoryofpaper.eu/