Schapiro, The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaro

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The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaron (Laurentian ms Or. 81): Their Place in Late MedievalArt and Supposed Connection with Early Christian and Insular Art Author(s): Meyer Schapiro Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 494-531Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049161Accessed: 31-03-2015 09:58 UTC

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The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaron (Laurentian MS Or. 81): Their Place in Late Medieval

Art and Supposed Connection with Early Christian and Insular Art

Meyer Schapiro and Seminar* I

In an article on the Persian manuscript of Tatian's Dia- tessaron in Florence (The Art Bulletin, L, 1968, 119-140), Carl Nordenfalk draws two conclusions which, if true, would radically affect certain of our ideas about the beginnings of both Early Christian and medieval art. He believes that the four decorated pages at the end of this codex, made for an Armenian bishop in 1547, preserve the types and even detailed forms of the ornament and pictures in a Greek manuscript produced in Rome about A.D. 170 under Tatian's eyes (Figs. I-4). They are then an evidence of the character of Christian art fifty years before the oldest surviving examples of Christian painting and sculpture. In the second place, the decoration and images of the Tatian manuscript in Florence appear to Nordenfalk so similar to the ornament and figures in the earliest Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts - the Books of Durrow, Echternach, Kells and others - that the genesis and certain peculiarities of that insular art - so isolated among the works of their time - can be explained by the copying of a Diatessaron manuscript like the archetype of the Florence codex. "Insular illumin- ation," he writes, "rested mainly on one pillar: a copy of an illustrated edition of Tatian's Diatessaron" (page 140o).

Nordenfalk's arguments will be examined here in the light of a larger body of works than he referred to in support of his conclusions. It will be shown that certain details of the miniatures, important in his reasoning, did not come into existence until centuries after Tatian's time. The decoration of the Florence codex contains signs of several historical strata - elements that belong to the arts of the sixteenth, the thirteenth, the sixth and perhaps the fifth century - but nothing we have been able to discover that supports a dating of the model in the second century A.D. Nevertheless, the manuscript retains a great interest because of its unique

page of the four symbols (Fig. 4) and the astonishing resemblance of its cross-carpet-page to one in the Book of Durrow (Figs. I, 15, 32, 33) - a resemblance that challenges the usual assumptions about the significance of similarities for dependence and independence of decorative forms widely separated in time and space.

If more details of the manuscript will be considered here than are necessary for testing Nordenfalk's two main conclusions, it is because in support of his thesis he has proposed, with respect to those details, new criteria for the dating and interpretation of Early Christian works; and he has presented all these criteria as generalities that apply to a large class of art.

II Before taking up the arguments from the content and forms of the miniatures, we shall consider their format and position in the manuscript. Nordenfalk gives these a considerable weight as evidences of the early model. He observes (page 122) that the decoration and pictures are at the end of the text rather than at the beginning as is usual in the Middle Ages, and that this placing of miniatures at the end is typical in classic manuscript art. He does not cite an example from Tatian's time or before; his evidence consists perhaps of the modest ornament of graphic pen-strokes applied by the scribe at the end of each book in Biblical codices of the fourth and fifth centuries. But the position at the end of the manuscript is consistent with an origin in the eighth or even tenth century, since miniatures and fully ornamented pages are found at the end of Armenian codices of that later period (the Etschmiadzin Gospels of 989, the Walters Art Gallery Gospels of 966), and the Gundohinus Gospels of A.D. 754 in Autun.1 How early were the models of these medieval works we cannot say; perhaps they go back

N.B. A bibliography of frequently cited sources, given short titles in the footnotes, will be found at the end of this article. * The article was written by Meyer Schapiro and includes the results of the work of the members of his seminar at Columbia University in the spring of 1969: Jane Buerger, Dr. Miriam S. Bunimn, Dominique Collon, Patricia Danz, Jeffrey Hoffeld, Ruth Kozodoy, Voichita Muntaneau, Marshall Myers, Linda Papaharis, Kathy Shelton, Adele L. Starensier, Michael Ward. Research was continued by the writer and Dr. Bunim later in 1969 and 1970. The article represents the views of the writer and perhaps would not have the assent of all the members of the seminar on every point. Because of the considerable discussion and exchange of ideas, it would be hard to indicate individual contributions equitably. An exception is Dr. Bunim's; she found the important evidence cited on page 512 concerning the matching of the symbols and the liquids and composed the chart on page 511 . Professor Nordenfalk has kindly supplied the photographs reproduced in Figs. 1-4. 1 Nordenfalk (page 122) mentions the latter, but ignores the Armenian examples. For these see F. Macler, L'Jvangile Armenien Ms. no. 229 de la

bibliothIque d'Etschmiadzin, Paris, 1920, and the same author's "Rapport sur une mission scientifique en Armenie Russe et en Arm6nie Turque," Nouvelles Archives des Missions Scientifiques, n.s., fasc. 2, Paris, 1911, I 15ff (with comment by G. Millet), figs. 23-26 (a manuscript formerly in Ortakeuy near Constantinople and now Walters MS 537). Cf. also the Gospels of I307 in the Mekhitarist Library in Venice (Ms 1917); S. Der Nersessian, Manuscrits Armeniens illustres des XIIe, XIIIe et XIVe sizcles de la BibliothIque des Pires Mikhitaristes de Venise, Paris, 1937, pl. LIV (fol. 293v, 294). For examples in Syriac manuscripts, see J. Leroy, Les Manuscrits Syriaques a peintures conserves dans les bibliotheques d'Europe et d'Orient, Paris, 1964, pls. 51-53 (Homs, Gospels of 1o54, fols. 349-351); pl. 56 (Paris, Bibl. Nat. syr. 41, fols. 178v, 179); pl. I20 (London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7169, fol. 127). Full-page ornamented crosses are common at the end of Syriac manuscripts; cf. Paris, Bibl. Nat. syr. 40, dated 1191; Wolfen- biittel A. Aug. Bibl. 31.300, fol. 284v; Leroy, Manuscrits Syriaques, pl. 2; and London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7169, fol. 248 (I2th-I3th century); Leroy, pl. io. The last pages of Hebrew and Arabic medieval manuscripts are sometimes richly decorated.


MINIATURES OF THE FLORENCE DIATESSARON 495

I The cross-carpet-page, fol. 127

2 The Four Evangelists, fol. 127v

3 Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, fol. 128

4 Diagram with Evangelist symbols, fol. I28v


496 THE ART BULLETIN

to the fifth or sixth century - to judge by certain features of the decoration and the types of the evangelists; evidence for an earlier origin has not been discovered, so far as we can learn. Since the portraits of the evangelists in these three manuscripts are all of the standing type which was usual in the Syro-Mesopotamian region, one may suppose a family connection with the ancestors of the evangelists in the Florence Tatian (Fig. 2). But we know nothing that permits us to place these ancestors in a manuscript of the second century A.D. One may note, too, that since the text of the Florence codex is in Persian and reads from right to left like the Syriac text from which it was translated, the miniatures at the end would correspond to the place of similar miniatures in front of a Greek or Armenian text reading from left to right. If these were copied in a Syriac or Persian book, they might be transposed accordingly to the left at the end of the new text. But this conjecture is less important than the fact that the placing of miniatures at the end of a text is no sign, as Nordenfalk supposes, of an origin of the models in the second century A.D.

A second argument is built on the premise that the miniatures betray in their format a model of square shape. This shape implies, he thinks, a codex of the same form, and since it is the typical form of the oldest Christian codices, the prototype of the Florence miniatures must have been contemporary with Tatian (pages 124, 127).

Every link in this chain of reasoning is weak. Not one of the four miniatures is in a square field. The drawing of the four symbols and the miniature of the four evangelists are clearly oblong. For the cross-carpet-page Nordenfalk supposes that in the model the whole cross was symmetrical vertically and horizontally, the stepped base in the Florence manuscript having been added later - presumably in the thirteenth or sixteenth century - when the cross was adapted to an oblong field. The same square cross, when fitted to the oblong field in the Book of Durrow, was given a second traverse (Fig. 15). These conjectures about the added elements rest on the supposition that the original cross was in a square field. But this is what has to be proved. Nordenfalk has supplied no evidence that such an ornamented cross of square format existed in manuscripts of the second or third century A.D. He has only proposed a means of accounting for the discrepancy between his hypothesis and the actual oblong shape of the cross-carpet-pages in the Florence Diatessaron and the Book of Durrow.

It is only on the third page, with the Entry into Jerusalem, that a square can be isolated in the field (Fig. 3). This alone, Nordenfalk argues, makes it "indisputable . . . that the miniature cycle was originally designed for an early codex with square pages" (page 127). But the square (or

near square) in which the scene takes place is only the upper part of a large oblong; the lower part was left unfinished, just as the border was not filled in the cross-carpet-page and as parts of the other miniatures are incomplete. The clue to the original treatment of the field in the model may be found in the nearly contemporary representation of the Entry in a Syriac manuscript, Vatican Borgia 169, reproduced by Nordenfalk (fig. 30; our Fig. Io). These two miniatures agree in so many respects that we cannot doubt they had a common ancestor.2 The Vatican example en- ables us to complete the one in Florence. It includes the figures who welcome Jesus by offering their robes - a detail found in most pictures of the Entry yet missing in the Florence miniature. Nordenfalk (page 128) asserts that the boys with the garments are an addition to the core model. But they are not only described in Tatian's text, they are represented in the oldest Syrian example: a miniature in the Rabula Gospels.3 While omitting them, the copyist has retained the horizontal ground line and the lower banded field of the foreground that accompany these figures in the Vatican miniature and other Syrian works. It may be that the artist was following a trend of his time, already notice- able in works of the thirteenth century, towards a more focused and compact rendering of this scene (see p. 516, below).

There is also the possibility that in the model a second subject filled the rectangle below the Entry. The division of an oblong narrative field into an upper near-square and a lower horizontal band is known to us in the Rabula Gospels of 586 in the page of the Crucifixion, and also in medieval Syrian miniatures.4

In any case Nordenfalk has not shown that the framed fields of ornament and illustration in codices of square form are generally square. In such early manuscripts as the Vatican Virgil and the Cotton Genesis they are frequently oblong. But miniatures of square or nearly square field occur in later manuscripts of oblong shape often enough to weaken Nordenfalk's argument. One can't help noting here the opposite kinds of supposition introduced to save the hypothesis of a square model. In the Entry miniature the artist, in order to adapt the scene to the format of the book, traces an oblong field, but from fidelity to a square model reproduces the latter as a square picture and leaves a blank rectangle below it within that oblong frame; while in the second case, in the cross-page, to adapt the square cross to the oblong field, he fills the latter by mounting the cross on a stepped pedestal.

Even if we accepted Nordenfalk's premise of a square form of the model, it would not follow that the prototype must have been a codex of Tatian's time. The square form

2 Leroy, Manuscrits Syriaques, pls. 145, 146. This lectionary of the Gospels also contains a cross-carpet-page (Fig. 16) so similar to the one in the Florence codex that Nordenfalk (page 123) is certain "that they must go back to the same model." Borgia 169 was copied in 1577 from a model written in 1285. 3 Leroy, pl. 30. In the scene of St. George and the dragon in the Borgia manuscript (Leroy, pI. 146) there is an unfilled colored band below the dragon, perhaps a residue of a model with a large foreground space. For another example of a miniature with an unfilled lower band, cf. Paris, Bibl. Nat. syr. 355; Leroy, pl. 67, 69. 4 Cf. London, Brit. Mus. Or. 3372; Leroy, pl. 66 (our Fig. I I), with the

Entry into Jerusalem above and four seated evangelists below. In the Vatican Lectionary Borgia 169 the scene of the Doubting Thomas (Leroy, pl. 145) is similarly set in a near-square reserved in an oblong field. In the band below are drawn three enigmatic horseshoe forms with knob-like circles at the ends. Their source becomes evident from comparison with the picture of the same subject in another Syriac manuscript, London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7169, fol. 13, where a wall with four horseshoe arches and a closed door is represented below Christ and the apostles (Leroy, pl. 123). The conception of the scene in Borgia 169 is clearly Byzantine in the postures of Christ and Thomas; Christ grasps the doubting apostle's wrist to bring his hand to the wound.



5 The Book of Protection, The Four Evangelists. London, Brit. Mus. Or. 6673 (from Gollancz, The Little Book ofProtection, opp. page 3)

of the page is not typical in the codices of the second and third centuries A.D. Most of the early fragments of the Gospels unearthed during the last decades are oblong.5 The square format is found rather among the large codices of the fourth to the sixth century; but even during that later period the oblong page occurs often.

III Let us turn now to the evidence of the representations. Whatever charm they may have through the naive sensibili- ty apparent in the spotting of the colors and the corre- spondences of line - for example, the pointed shapes of the ass's tail and legs in the Entry (Fig. 3) and the continuities of Christ's hand and the foliage - one will recognize that these pictures are the work of an inexperienced painter, a provincial, who may be the scribe himself. He is certainly

no professional with full command of the skills of a Persian miniature painter of his time. In determining the age of his model - for he surely did not invent these compositions - we must try to discern the traces of older art in both the conception and the form while allowing for the features that depend on his naive reductive process of copying.

The drawing of the four evangelists (Fig. 2) preserves in details of architecture, ornament, inscriptions, posture and costume enough signs to warrant the belief that the miniature which served as the model reproduced in part a still older set of figures of the evangelists. There are elements here from quite different periods and ethnic groups. From the colophon we learn that the Persian translator in the thirteenth century had a Syriac text before him. Did that Syriac manuscript contain these illustrations ? We are not sure. But the fact that the evangelists' names are inscribed in Syriac estrangelo letters on a vertical axis strongly suggests an old Syriac model of this picture, though such a model might have been available to the copyist of 1547 in a manuscript other than a Diatessaron, perhaps in a Syriac lectionary or Gospels.6 It is possible, too, that the Syriac inscriptions were added in the Diatessaron of the thirteenth century to miniatures copied from a non-Syriac source. The order of the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, from left to right, is contrary to what we expect in a book that reads from right to left.7 The picture might have been borrowed by the Syrian artist from an older Greek or Armenian manuscript with a left-to-right direction. The very fact of this order, with all four names, points to a time after Tatian's, when the canon of the four evangelists had definitely emerged and the Gospels were grouped in the sequence Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.8 In the early Syriac Gospel manuscript called the Curetonensis, which contains readings from Tatian, the order of the text is Matthew, Mark, John and Luke; and in the Greek Codex Bezae, with Tatianic passages, it is Matthew, John, Mark and Luke.9

There is a strong reason to doubt that the picture of the evangelists was originally designed for a Greek manuscript of Tatian: the fact that the four writers of the Gospel are not directly associated with the text of the Diatessaron. Nowhere in an author's preface or a heading of the text is

5 On "the variety of format in the early papyrus codices," C. H. Roberts writes ("The Codex," Proceedings of the British Academy, London, 1954, 198, 199): "It is certainly too great to encourage any attempt to associate a particular format with a given time . . . Of the earliest codices some have a square format; in others the height of the page is double or more than double the breadth; in yet another the height is half as much again as the breadth."

In the Florence manuscript the books held by the evangelists and by Jesus in the Entry (Figs. 2, 3) are described by Nordenfalk as of"approx- imately square proportions" (page 127); but the ratios measured on the photographs range in these books between 2:3 and 3:4. 6 The vertical alignment of the letters (erect in Greek and Latin, but turned ninety degrees in Syriac inscriptions) does not seem to occur in pictures before the 3rd century; it is found in the colophon of the scribe, Filocalus, on the narrow margin of an inscription of the Pope Damasus in the 4th century (C. M. Kaufmann, Handbuch der altchristlichen Epi- graphik, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1917, fig. 29). But the vertical alignment is so common in later Greek, Latin, Syrian and Armenian art that this feature by itself gives no indication of the age of the model. For an estrangelo inscription in a Syrian miniature of the 13th century, remarkably similar in style to the inscriptions in the Diatessaron, see the leaf

with a figure of St. Luke in the Morgan Library, Ms 774 (Leroy, pl. 54), and also London, Brit. Mus. Or. 3372, a lectionary of ca. 1200 (Leroy, pl. 66; our Fig. I I). 7 Note that in the Entry miniature (Fig. 3) the movement is from right to left, in keeping with the direction of the Syriac and Persian scripts. 8 Cf. E. Hennecke, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Ubersetzung, 4th ed., Tubingen, 1964, I, I Iff.: "In the second half of the second century one had still no fixed canon of the evangiles and one felt the multiplicity of the evangiles to be a real problem." The earliest known reference to the four Gospels in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke, John is in the Latin Muratorian text which is attributed to a date close to 200. 9 In the Syriac Rabula Gospels of 586 the evangelists' portraits are grouped in the canon tables from right to left in the order John and Matthew (fol. 9v), Luke and Mark (fol. Ior), in correspondence to the successive canon tables that couple passages common to each of these pairs (Leroy, pl. 28). See also Leroy, pages 170, 171, on the variable order of the four authors in Syriac and Greek Gospel manuscripts. As late as the 13th century, in the Kevorkian Syriac evangelary, the authors are represented in pairs, Matthew-Luke above, John-Mark below (Leroy, pl. 149 and pages 411-13).



6 Cover of wooden box (detail), Crucifixion. Vatican, Museo Cristiano (from L. von Matt, G. Daltrop, A. Prandi, Art Treasures of the Vatican Library, New York, I970, pl. 67)

the reader told that the work is a harmony of the writings of the four evangelists or a text excerpted from them. It is in two pages of Arabic writing, independent of Tatian and placed at the end of the book (fol. 129-I29V), that the evangelists are named and characterized at length in this Persian manuscript. Their pictures, together with the other paintings, precede these added pages and follow the Armen- ian bishop's colophon on fol. I24v.10 In ignoring this point, Nordenfalk has disregarded a basic feature of medieval book illustration: the connection of image and text. The same point applies to the miniatures of the four symbols of the evangelists; these too, and the inscriptions that match the four evangelists with the four rivers of Paradise and the four liquids, appear nowhere in Tatian's text nor in any other of his writings. What motivated Tatian in composing a single Gospel narrative from excerpts of all four was not just the need to demonstrate the harmony of the four Gospels despite their discrepancies or to provide a small compact book, but the desire to produce a text that would accord with his own theological views. He begins with the Gospel of John and omits the story of the human origin of Jesus; he also makes use of some extra-canonical matter.11 For the early fathers, Irenaeus, Origen, and Clement of Alexandria, the quaternity of the evangels was an essential fact of which the necessity was revealed in the correspond-

ence to other sets of four in the cosmos: the cardinal points, the four quarters of the earth, the rivers of paradise, the four creatures in the visions of Ezekiel and John, etc. In the Florence codex the inscriptions naming the zoa, the evangelists, the rivers and their liquids are in Arabic. Since Arabic Christianity dates from a period well after Tatian and the Arabic version of the Gospels belongs to the ninth century at the earliest, Nordenfalk's argument is weakened further.12 Both pages of the Diatessaron with pictures relating to the four evangelists must be regarded then as additions to the archetype; they were introduced from another source and most likely at a time when images of the evangelists were already a commonplace in the decoration of manuscripts of the four Gospels.

The conception of the four evangelists as figures standing under an arcade is closest to pictures in Armenian Gospel manuscripts. The Syriac inscriptions seem to point in another direction; yet one can construct a plausible line of descent in which an Armenian model in a Gospel manuscript was transmitted to Syria and eventually copied in a Syriac codex by a miniaturist of the twelfth or thirteenth century.

In Armenian art this conception of the four figures within an arcade is found particularly in works of the eleventh and twelfth centuries from the region of Melitene close to Syrian

10 In addition, the Persian translator of the Syriac text, in his prologue- colophon on fols. Iov-I2V, calls the book "the evangile of the four evangiles" and names them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. See G. Messina, Diatessaron Persiano (Biblica et Orientalia, xIv), Rome, 195 1, xviii. 11 Ibid., xxxix ff. Although the manuscript is particularly rich in Tatianic readings, it is not, as Nordenfalk seems to think, a direct copy of Tatian's original text. The recent editor, Messina, speaks of the text of the Florence codex as "not very distant from the original composition," but he makes no attempt to date the basic Syriac text and he notes many deviations from that text: a radical rearrangement of the order of the selections from the Gospels, as known through other manuscript versions, many conflations, and even borrowings from apocryphal Gospels - the Infancy ofJesus and the Protoevangile ofJames as well as the Evangile of

the Hebrews (Messina, xxixff). 12 The Arabic text and the inscriptions on the page of the four symbols might have been added in the 13th century by 'Izz al-Din, an Arabic- speaking Christian of Tabriz, who translated the Syriac text of the Diatessaron into Persian. There is reference to the Koran in the intro- duction to the Gospel harmony on fol. 2r (Messina, xxiii). On this personality see Nordenfalk, page I2o (summarizing Messina). Professor G. von Grunebaum, to whom were submitted photographs of the Arabic pages, fols. I29- 29v, has kindly commented that their text "clearly does not precede the date of the manuscript (1547) by a very long time." For the date of the translation of the Gospels into Arabic see Georg Graf, Geschichte der Christlichen arabischen Literatur, Vatican City, I, 1944, 35-41, 142ff.



Mesopotamia (Nordenfalk, figs. 8, 13) 13 Nordenfalk is aware of this fact, and to justify bringing the iconographic type back to the earliest Christian antiquity he points to the absence of haloes as a sign of dependence on a very old model, prior to the fourth century when Christ and the apostles first received haloes. It is not certain, however, that these figures lack haloes; and even if they did, we would not be convinced that this fact implies a model of the second century A.D. Apostles appear without haloes in several Syriac manuscript paintings of the twelfth and later centuries, which are unlikely to have been copied from so early a model.14 It may be that in the Florence Diatessaron the copyist, in his exceedingly crude drawing of the heads and through misunderstanding of his model, has conflated the hair and the haloes. The upper line of the forehead is the same as in all the other human heads in the pictures in this manuscript - the Christ and the two boys in the Entry (Fig. 3) and the man-symbol (Fig. 4). But while in the latter there are short curved strokes for the curly hair above that line, and on Christ's head the vertical of the cross in the nimbus starts from the brow-line and passes through the hair, the evangelists have what appears as a large turban- like, colored segment of a circle, without marks of hair, which alternates in color from head to head. The form of this segment is identical with Christ's halo in the picture of the Entry; in both the outline of the halo touches ears and cheeks (Fig. 2).15 Nordenfalk recognizes this fact and tries to reconcile it with his previous observation by supposing that since there was no halo in the original model of the second century, the copyist interpreted the hair as a halo

7 Ampulla, Crucifixion.Washington, D.C., Dumbarton Oaks Coll. (courtesy Coll.)

8 Ampulla, Bobbio, Crucifixion (after Grabar, Les Ampoules de Terre Sainte [Monza-Bobbio], pl. xxxv)

13 See Nordenfalk, page 125, n. 33, for a list of examples. Even the arrangement of the figures perpendicular to the main axis of the page occurs in Armenian Gospel manuscripts, e.g., the Freer Gallery, Wash- ington, D.C., MS 47-3, fol. Cv; S. Der Nersessian, Armenian Manuscripts in the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C., 1963, fig. 8, where all stand under arches as in the Florence Diatessaron. This arrangement is found also in late medieval Syriac manuscripts, e.g., London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7169 and 7174; Leroy, pls. 120, 12 1, 152. According to Professor Der Nerses- sian (page 4) the grouping of all four evangelists on one page is a type specifically of the I Ith century and later; in the i oth century the four evangelists were placed on two confronting pages.

The resemblance to the four evangelists in manuscripts from Melitene (Malatya), an Armenian center, suggests a possible connection through a personage named in a gloss on Luke 2:25 on fol. I9v of the Diatessaron. Messina identified the Simeon who is mentioned there as "an extra- ordinary old man of Harum," with a Jacobite, Simeon, from Rum Kale on the Euphrates; he resided in Mongolia for several years and was active in helping the persecuted Christians in Iran and later headed a monastery of Bar Sauma near Melitene. Messina conjectured that it was he who commissioned 'Izz al-Din to translate the Gospels from Syriac into Persian, ca. 1270-1280, for the benefit of the second generation of the transplanted Syrian community in Persia. Simeon had been in Melitene between 1265 and 1269, and Messina supposed that when he and his monks were forced to abandon the monastery in that Armenian center, he might have taken the sacred books with him and given one to 'Izz al-Din to translate. There is reason to believe that there were Armenians among the exiled Syrians. 14 Cf. London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7169; Leroy, pls. I 19-124. In the Rabula Gospels Matthew and John have no haloes, while Mark and Luke are nimbed. On the ivory cover of the Etschmiadzin Gospels - a work of the 6th century attributed to Syria - there are no haloes on Christ or the apostles. The evangelists are portrayed without haloes or books on the Milan ivory book covers, though the four symbols on the same covers have books and haloes. 15 As late as 1499 the evangelists and apostles in London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7174, are represented without haloes, but have on their heads a round cap-like mass vaguely like a halo; Leroy, pl. 151.



(page 125, n. 32a). But this assumes precisely what he had at first set out to prove by the absence of haloes in these figures.

A second argument for the early date of the prototype is the beardlessness of the evangelists. Nordenfalk does not cite any evidence that all four were ever represented as beardless in Early Christian art or in the East at any time. But he finds in an Irish manuscript of the late eighth or ninth century, the Book of Mulling (Dublin, Trinity College 6o),16 a series of figures of the evangelists without beards, and he takes this set to be a Western descendant of the same early prototype. These Irish figures have haloes, however; and to connect them with the un-haloed models, Nordenfalk interprets the breaking of the upper frame by the halo as a sign that the halo is an intrusive addition. But in a picture of an evangelist in the same style in another Irish manuscript of that period, British Museum Add. Ms 40o618, the head itself crosses the frame and shows that the halo breaking through the frame in the Book of Mulling was not made necessary by the addition of a halo to a model without one.17 In the Florence manuscript the uniform circular shape of the haloes, all identical with Christ's halo in the Entry, is adapted like the latter to the semi-circles of the arches above their heads. Haloes and arches are nearly concentric, and both sets of curves have been traced with a compass or drawn around a circular disk, unlike the outlines of the hair of the boys (Fig. 3) or the man-symbol (Fig. 4).

The peculiar appearance of the evangelists' heads in the Diatessaron may be matched with the corresponding four figures in a recent Syriac manuscript (British Museum Oriental Ms 6673) from the north of Mosul in the Syro- Mesopotamian region. It is the so-called Book of Protection, a work of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, containing Christian spells and incantations.18 In the drawings which are an essential part of the book, the four evangelists are represented in a primitive folk style: identical frontal figures, all beardless and with a large circular segment above the face, that may be read as hair or halo (Fig. 5). The inscriptions of their names are vertical. In several of the miniatures the figures stand at right angles to the axis of the text, as in the Florence Tatian and other medieval Syriac manuscripts.'9 (This practice is found also in the Manichean manuscripts of the ninth century and may go back to an earlier period.) The most frequent

subject of illustration is the rider saint or prophet. These mounted figures suggest that the choice of the Entry into Jerusalem as a unique theme in the Diatessaron, without the accompanying figures of the men welcoming Christ, may be connected with the type of rider saint as a favorite folk image.20 In the same manuscript are drawn some isolated birds much like the dove on a margin of the Florence manuscript (fol. 22v) beside the text recounting the baptism of Christ.21 The content of this recent book makes it highly improbable that it was copied from a work of the second century or owes anything to the Diatessaron.

In the Diatessaron the misunderstood postures and costumes of the evangelists retain in their medieval folk aspect enough traces of asymmetry and overlapping of robes - of mantle and tunic - to justify the idea that they descend from a model of the fifth or sixth century. The books are of an oblong shape that might have been introduced at any point in a course of re-copyings between the sixth century and the sixteenth. But although a feature like the asymmetry of the feet of the first evangelist (Matthew) suggests an Early Christian prototype, the uniformity of the figures and the array of identical gestures - in a whole that is varied in a decorative spirit by alternations of colors and of ornament - might be taken to indicate a model of the sixth century in which gesture and costume had already become more stereotyped.22 Such regular repetition of posture and dress is common in the medieval art of the Near East not only in provincial and naive works,23 but even in certain Byzantine miniatures and ivory carvings which were done with great skill of modeling and with refined detail.24 The inverted V defining the lower edge of the mantle is not a late classic form nor an invention of the painter of 1547; it appears characteristically in an Armenian miniature of the four evangelists reproduced by Nordenfalk.25 These figures of the eleventh century are also set under arches and between decorated supports like the evangelists of the Dia- tessaron. But there are enough differences in the conception of hands and books to lead us to look for the model in another variant in the same family.

Nordenfalk observes that in the Armenian miniature the evangelists are grouped in pairs as if conversing - a type that emerges in the fourth or fifth century - while those in the Diatessaron are isolated and frontal; he infers that the latter must copy a model that preceded the conversing type.

16 E. H. Zimmermann, Vorkarolingische Miniaturen, Berlin, 1918, pl. 194. Apostles are beardless in the Last Judgment and Crucifixion scenes in St. Gall, 5 I, a Gospels of the Irish school; Zimmermann, pl. I88a, b. These scenes are unlikely to go back to models of the 2nd or 3rd century. 17 British Museum, Reproductions from Illuminated Manuscripts, London, 1928, IV, 7, and pl. II. It should be noted that in the Book of Mulling too the head of an evangelist crosses the upper frame; Zimmermann, pl. 194b. 18 See The Book of Protection, ed. Herman Gollancz, London, 1912. Some of the miniatures are reproduced by E. A. Wallis Budge, Amulets and Talismans, New York, n.d., 273-280. 19 See note 13 above and Leroy, pls. 120, 121, 150. 20 As in Coptic art. Leroy, page 407, notes the Coptic Christians' love of the image of Christ as a horseman and the taste for the Entry into Jerusalem in Syrian art, without alluding to the possible connection of the latter with the rider saint. 21 This image of the Holy Spirit, ignored by Nordenfalk, appears also on the margins of the texts of Matthew, Mark and Luke, describing the

Baptism, in the Etschmiadzin Gospels of 989. See F. Macler, L'e'vangile Armdnien Ms. no. 229, fols. I2V, 72V, I I9V. 22 As on the Ravenna sarcophagus used as an altar frontal in the chapel of the Cathedral. Cf. also the medallion bust portraits of the evangelists on the frontispiece of the Rossano Gospels, fol. 5- 23 Cf. the Etschmiadzin Gospels of 989, fols. 6v, 7, and various Syriac manuscripts reproduced by Leroy: Vatican syr. 559, dated 1219-1220 (pl. 712), London, Brit. Mus. Or. 3372 (pl. 66), Add. Ms 7169 (pl. I19), Mosul Collection (pl. 146). 24 A. Goldschmidt and K. Weitzmann, Die byzantinischen Elfenbein- skulpturen des X-XIIIJahrhunderts, Berlin, 1930-1934, II, pls. v, 18; x, 31 ; xv, 38; xxxvII, 100oo; XLI, I I a. Cf. also the four evangelists in Byzantine style in Vatican lat. 5974, the Crusaders' Gospels of the Holy Sepulchre, preceding the canon tables; H. Buchthal, Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Oxford, 1957, pl. 40. 25 See his figure 8. For Byzantine examples, see Goldschmidt and Weitz- mann, pls. x, 3 I; xv, 38a.



This is not a convincing argument. In the Rabula Gospels, too, the paired standing evangelists do not converse. There are also Armenian miniatures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in which the four evangelists are presented in strict isolation as in the Florence page (cf. Jerusalem, Library of the Armenian Patriarchate, Ms 1924; Erevan Library, Ms 2877).26 Their forms betray dependence on Byzantine art in the varied details of the costume, though the type of standing evangelist found so often in Greek works may go back to an Early Christian model from Hellenized Syria. The frontality in all these medieval works is a classic inheri- tance favored by Christian artists in the fifth and sixth centuries when there was a widespread tendency to composition by alignment of isolated statuesque figures, a tendency already evident in Hellenistic reliefs. The frontal pose was reproduced in turn and made more rigid by the naivet6 and inexperience of the sixteenth-century copyist.

That there was for this composition a stage of copying between the early medieval prototype and the drawing of 1547, in which new elements were introduced, seems probable from the architectural forms. Several details of the arcade point to an acquaintance with Moslem art. These are: the arches wedged like diaphragms between ornamented pilasters that rise to the entablature above the arches; the little paired studs below the spring of these arches; and the supports without capitals and bases - all features foreign to the late classic art that furnished the models for arcades in Armenian and Syrian manuscript paintings of the sixth to tenth century. Such details are typical in miniatures of the Bagdad school, e.g., the thirteenth-century al-Hariri manuscript, Paris, Bibl. Nat. arabe 6094,27 and in later Persian miniatures.28 They are based on the methods of brick con- struction in the medieval Mesopotamian and Persian world.29 It is conceivable that the copyist of 1547, having seen these forms in his own milieu, inserted them himself; but to judge by the reductive tendency of his inexpert style, it is more likely that he transposed them from his more complex model.

IV In the third miniature - The Entry into Jerusalem (Fig. 3) - Nordenfalk has found several details that seem to him

9 Wooden door from Mu'Allaka, Cairo, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. London, Brit. Mus. No. 987 (courtesy Museum)

26 See the catalogue of the Helen and Edward Mardigian Museum, Treasures of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 1969, 20 and pl. 3, No. 2 (Ms 1924, dated lo64-1o66, from Shukr Khandaria, near Melitene); L. Durnovo, Drevne armianskaya miniatiura, Erevan, 1952, 71 (Erevan 2877). There is an example in an Armenian leaf of late medieval date in The Metropolitan Museum, New York, 57.185.3. 27 Reproduced by H. Buchthal in Ars Islamica, vII, I940, I85ff., fig. 16. See also the al-Hariri manuscript from Bagdad in Leningrad, ca. 1225- 1235; R. Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, New York, 1962, Io6, 107; and the Dioscurides of 1224 in The Metropolitan Museum, New York; Ettinghausen, 87. 28 Cf. a miniature from Shiraz dated 1410, in Survey of Persian Art, ed. A. Pope and P. Ackerman, London, 1938, v, pl. 86o, where we see also the source of the studs below the spring of the arch in the Florence drawing. For other examples of this architecture in later Syriac miniatures, cf. Vatican syr. 559 (Leroy, pl. 874) ; London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7170 (Leroy, pl. 861), and Brit. Mus. Rich. 7174, dated 1499 (Leroy, pl. 15i2). 29 For buildings with these arch and pilaster forms, cf. Survey of Persian Art, pls. 278, 290, 313, 4o8, 41o, 428, 429 etc., and Derek Hill and Oleg Grabar, Islamic Architecture and Its Decoration, A.D. 8oo-I50o, London, 1964, figs. 25, 31.



peculiar to the art of the second century (page 130). One of these is the ass's head painted red in contrast to the uncolored body. He supposes that the cult of the ass ascribed by pagans to the Jews and Christians during the first centuries of our era is the ground of this coloring in the manuscript of 1547. "That emphasis given in color to the head would seem to make sense only if the prototype of the miniature dates back to the latter half of the second century, when both Jews and Christians were accused of onolatry." He is aware that the heads of the lion and the man on the following page with the four symbols are also painted red; but he does not take this fact seriously enough to consider an alternative explanation that applies to all of them.30 Such distinction of a valued creature's head31 through a stronger color than the rest of the body is familiar in the ornament of textiles in the Near East during the Early Christian and medieval periods.32 In a provincial style in which variation of color in large spots is characteristic and breaks the monotony of repeated forms in the drawing and composition, we are not surprised to find elements of textile design. In the related manuscript, Vatican Borgia 169, St. George in combat with the dragon rides on a white horse with a red head; the white body is marked by an ornament of dots forming star-like circles.33

It is possible, too, that the color of the ass's head is a residue of a model with a red and white spotting prized in the Middle East.34 Not only is the native ass a reddish creature - and this color is associated with the ass-headed demonic Egyptian deity Seth-Typhon35 - but the Hebrew for ass "Chamor," resembles "Chomer" - red, clay, brick - a similarity that holds in Syriac and Arabic as well.36 Even without these alternative explanations of the red of the ass's head in the miniature, we would doubt Nordenfalk's reason-

ing from the color to onolatry and from the latter to a necessary origin of the model in the second century.

A further argument of Nordenfalk for a model dating from the second century is the peculiar cross nimbus of Christ (page 129). A small horizontal stroke on the upper vertical line in the nimbus produces the effect of a little cross above Christ's head (Fig. 3). One is reminded of the similar place of a complete cross within Christ's nimbus in the mosaic of the arch of triumph at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, a work of the fifth century. But Nordenfalk proposes a reading of the cross nimbus in the Tatian miniature that would distinguish it from the Roman example and permit one to date the type in the pre-Constantinian period. He regards the nimbus itself and the larger virtual cross within the nimbus as later additions to an original image that showed only a little cross above Christ's head without a nimbus. Such a cross is found on two works attributed to the third century and might - in his opinion - have existed in the century before.

"If nothing else convinced us that the miniature cycle in the Persian Diatessaron reflects an early prototype, this detail alone would be enough to do so" (page 129). A surprising statement, since the cross above a head is a recurrent feature in Christian art; there are many examples on Byzantine imperial coins of the fifth to the tenth century.37 It could be introduced in a particular subject for the first time from another theme; the date of the earliest use of the motif is not necessarily the date of the model of any work in which that motif appeared. Would Nordenfalk suppose that the miniature of the Doubting Thomas in the Borgia Lectionary (Vatican 169) - a familiar Byzantine type - must also go back to a prototype of the pre-Constan- tinian age because a little cross is drawn over Christ's head

30 Of the Christ in the Entry only the head is painted red; the bare arm, hand, and feet are left uncolored; and on the page of the four symbols, the man's arms, hands and feet are unpainted. For color reproductions of these two pages see G. Messina, Cristianesimo, Buddhismo, Manicheismo nell' Asia, Rome, 1947, frontispiece and plate opp. page 150. 31 On the valuation of the ass and particularly in Syria, see W. Deonna, "Laus Asini," Revue Belge de philologie et d'histoire, xxxIv, 1956, 626ff. and passim. Syria, he writes, is the "patrie par excellence de cet animal et d'une race d'anes de valeur." See also pages 362ff. on the sacredness of the ass. 32 Cf. a silk of the 6th or 7th century from Egypt reproduced by E. Kitzinger, Early Mediaeval Art in the British Museum, London, 1940, pl. 14; also on the silk shroud of St. Siviard, Byzantine i ith century; the griffin, Sens, Cathedral Treasury (T. D. Rice and M. Hirmer, The Art of Byzantium, New York, 1959, pl. I3'); Lyons, Musde des Tissus, Byzantine silk from Mozat, Ioth or I Ith century(?) (C. Diehl, Manuel d'art byzantin, Paris, 1925, II, fig. 313); Berlin, Kunstgewerbe Museum, Persian or Mesopotamian, I Ith-I12th century (G. Migeon, Manuel d'art Musulman, Paris, 1927, II, fig. 412); and examples from Spain in Berlin and Lyons (figs. 425, 426); Paris, Louvre, fabric from Aachen treasure, pink griffins with heads and feet of gold (Cahier and Martin, Milanges d'archeologie, d'histoire et de litteirature, Paris, ii, 1851, pl. 43). On this motif note the description of a red fabric from Antioch in the inventory of the treasure of Canterbury Cathedral in I315: "vestimentum de panno rubeo Antioche, cum avibus et bestiis virides, et capitibus etpedibus auratis"; there was also a specimen on a white cloth (F. Michel, Recherches sur le commerce, la fabrication et l'usage des itoffes de soie, d'or et d'argent et d'autres tissus precieux en Occident pendant le moyen dge, Paris, 1852, I, 32, n. 3). Cf. also the distinctively colored heads of the four zoa in late Byzantine embroideries: G. Millet, Broderies religieuses de style byzantin, Paris, 1947, pl. cxciim, epitaphios, San Marco, Venice. Buraq, the mare on which

Mohammed ascends to heaven, is often represented with a gold head in Persian miniatures.

33 See Leroy, pl. 146, I, and A. Stegen'ek, "Eine syrische Miniatur- handschrift des Museo Borgiano," Oriens Christianus, I, 1901, 347. 34 A recent traveler in Saudi Arabia writes: "One of the entertaining features of Hofuf is the donkeys; cream-colored donkeys with their heads and forequarters dyed a rich shade of henna," Ilka Chase, Around the World and Other Places, New York, 1970, 171. 35 Plutarch in his essay on Isis and Osiris (chaps. 30-31) reports the belief that Seth Typhon riding on a red ass begot Hierosolymus and Judaeos, the ancestors of the Jews. The charge of onolatry brought against the Jews (and hence the early Christians) seems to have been influenced by this assertion. 36 See W. Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramdisches Handwarterbuch iiber das Alte Testament, I3th ed., Leipzig, 1899, 259-260, s.v. Chamor. For the red color of the native red ass in Syria, see 0. Keller, Die antike Tierwelt, Leipzig, 1909, I, 268. The ass, he observes, is called "the red" in West Turkish.

In the Smyrna manuscript of the Physiologus, a Greek work of ca. I 1oo, the wild ass is represented as red with a blue mane. The text tells that it lives in a royal palace; J. Strzygowski, Der Bilderkreis des griechischen Physiologus, Leipzig, 1899, 127. 37 H. Peirce and R. Tyler, L'art byzantin, Paris, 1932, I, pl. I I6b (Licinia Eudoxia) ; W. Wroth, Catalogue of the Imperial Byzantine Coins in the British Museum, London, I908, I, pls. xmII, 17-19, XIV, XV, xxIm, etc.; A. Grabar, L'iconoclasme byzantin, Paris, 1957, figs. 2, 6, 7, 10, I I, etc. It appears also on seals, over the heads of Western rulers active in the Crusades - the German Emperor Conrad III and Richard of England. See E. Heyck, Die Kreuzziige und das heilige Land, Leipzig, 1900, figs. 76, 99, 1 oo.



outside the nimbus ?38 The cross above the head is found in other contexts in East and West39 and even in New Mexico where it appears on a santo with St. Francis, painted by a native Indian in recent times.40

It should be noted that the early examples cited by Nordenfalk to prove the existence of this motif in the second century are not of an image of Christ with a cross above his head. One is a lay figure in a funerary context; the second is a profile head on a gilded glass medallion from Egypt - the profile alone makes the interpretation as Christ doubt- ful. Besides, the dating of these two works in the third century is quite uncertain.41

When does the cross first appear as an attribute above or behind Christ's head? The common view, based on study of surviving works from the third century to the sixth - and they are considerable in number - is that the cross, like the Chi-Rho monogram, was first represented above or behind Christ's head in the fourth century. The nimbus, without cross or monogram, was introduced during the same period, and the combination of nimbus with enclosed cross or monogram behind or above Christ's head is a type of the fifth century; but in the fifth and even in the sixth there were still many images of Christ without nimbus or cross.42 All this makes it improbable that the cross was employed, as Nordenfalk conjectures, in a representation of Christ in a manuscript of ca. 170.

The seemingly anomalous configuration of the two crosses in the Florence drawing is better explained by a type of cross in use throughout the Near East during the later Middle Ages. The pattern of the cross in the nimbus resembles clearly the Byzantine patriarchal cross with two traverses, the shorter one representing the title-board of the

Crucifixion.43 It would be well suited for the royal entry of Christ into Jerusalem, since in the Gospel story the inscribed title on the cross announced in three languages that Christ was king of the Jews (John 19: 19-20). Moreover on Byzan- tine coins the patriarchal cross was often shown held by the emperor or jointly by the emperor and empress, much like the figures of Constantine and Helena with the cross in later Syriac manuscripts.44 The Byzantine patriarchal cross is also an attribute held by Christ in Syrian miniatures of the Resurrection and the Anastasis - scenes of triumph - and by martyrs, though it is not the typical form of the great emblematic cross on the frontispiece and end pages.45

In a drawing of the tenth century in a Greek manuscript of the sermons of John Chrysostom (Athens, National Library, Ms 2I I, fol. 34v), a cross with two traverses breaks through the outline of the great halo around Christ's head.46

There is a Syro-Palestinian painting of the Crucifixion in which the cross in Christ's nimbus is entirely above his head, as in the Florence miniature, and the traverse is plainly a representation of the title-board of the original cross. It is on a wood panel in the Vatican Museo Cristiano, variously dated by scholars between the sixth and ninth centuries (Fig. 6).47 The ends of the title-board are shaped as append- ages like those on the classic and Early Christian tabula ansata. As part of a Crucifixion it is unlikely to go back to the second century since the subject was first represented after 400. Conceived as translucent, the halo does not conceal the parts of the wooden cross behind the head but allows the shaft and the title-board to appear through it.48

In another Crucifixion from the same region, on an ampulla of the Monza-Bobbio type now in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection (Fig. 7), the same classic title-board is

38 Leroy, pl. 145, No. 2. Cf. also the little cross above the crucified Christ in an Armenian miniature of o1038, Matenadaran 6201; L. A. Durnovo, Miniatures Armeniennes, Paris, 1960, 47. 39 See A. Kriicke, Der Nimbus und verwandte Attribute in derfriihchristlichen Kunst, Strasbourg, 1905, 124, 125, and pl. II, 4. He lists on page 125, n. I, eight examples of Christ with a cross or Chi-Rho monogram above his head and without a halo; the oldest are of the 4th and 5th centuries. An example from the 9th century is the cross over the head of Christ on fol. 2 of the Stuttgart Psalter (ed. DeWald). The cross appears over the head of the eagle and within its halo in a sculpture of the i3th century representing the symbol of Mark on the south porch of Haghia Sophia at Trebizond (see D. T. Rice, The Church of Haghia Sophia at Trebizond, Edinburgh, 1968, pl. 20). Professor Rice thinks the inscription identify- ing the eagle with Mark is a mistake for John (page 50); he has ignored the text of Irenaeus that in matching the zoa with the evangelists associ- ates the eagle with Mark (see our table on p. 511 ). 40 Ten Panels Probably Executed by the Indians of New Mexico in the Collection of the Hispanic Society of America, New York, 1926, pl. Iv. 41 Also attributed to the 3rd century are the examples of a complete cross above Christ's head, breaking through the circle of the nimbus, on two lamps in the Museum of Alexandria, with representations of the Raising of Lazarus; R. Pagenstecher, "Die Auferweckung des Lazarus auf einer r6mischen Lampe," Bulletin de la Societe Archeologique d'Alex- andrie, n.s., 11, No. 11, 1909, 267ff. They are more likely to be works of the 5th or 6th century. 42 See Kriicke, I7ff. and passim, and the articles "A und W" and "Heil- igenschein" by N. Miuller in Realencyklopddie fiir protestantische Theologie und Kirchengeschichte, ed. Hauck-Herzog, I, 1-12; vII, 561-66. 43 For examples on coins see Wroth, Imperial Byzantine Coins, 11, pls. 48ff. and A. Grabar, L'iconoclasme byzantin, Paris, 1957, figs. 15, 16, 42, 43, 45, 48. 44 See Grabar, fig. 50o, and for the Syrian examples, Leroy, pl. 99 (Lon-

don, Brit. Mus. Add. 7170, Vatican syr. 559), and pl. 104, a manuscript in Midyat. 45 Leroy, pls. 92, 132, 133, and the frontispiece of Vol. I. For an Armen- ian example, see the Mekhitarist Library Ms 1635, dated i193 (Der Nersessian, Armenian Manuscripts, pl. xxx), a miniature with the cross on a throne in the sky to illustrate the Second Coming. 46 See M. Schapiro, "Notes on Castelseprio," Art Bulletin, xxxix, 1957, 292ff. and fig. 2, and Grabar, "A propos du nimbe crucifre ?' Castel- seprio," Cahiers Archiologiques, viI, 1954, 157-159 and pl. LIV. 47 It is the cover of a pilgrim's souvenir-box. See C. R. Morey, "The Painted Panel from the Sancta Sanctorum," Festschrift Paul Clemen, Diisseldorf, 1926, 51Iff. He dates it ca. 600. W. Felicetti-Liebenfels, Geschichte der byzantinischen Ikonenmalerei, Olten-Lausanne, 1956, pl. 36, calls it a work of the 6th century, and W. Volbach, in the Museo Sacro, Guida IV, II Tesoro della cappella Sancta Sanctorum, Vatican City, 1944, pl. 14, "VIIIth-IXth century." 48 That the title-board of the cross is represented here is evident from the vertical post which is visible also above the heads of the other crucified figures and from the difference from the form of the cross nimbus of Christ in the scene of Baptism below. For other examples of the title- board as a tabula ansata, cf. the fresco of the Crucifixion in the chapel of SS. Cyriacus and Julitta in Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome (8th century); the miniature in the Chludoff Psalter (A. Grabar, L'iconoclasme byzantin, figs. 158, 159); the Drogo Sacramentary (Paris Bibl. Nat. lat. 9428, fol. 43v; W. Koehler, Die Karolingischen Miniaturen, Berlin, 1960, In, pl. 83c).

In the scene of the Crucifixion on two ampullae from the Holy Land in Bobbio (6th century), the bust of the nimbed Christ is set in a great medallion at the center of the crucifix of which the limbs extend across and beyond the medallion; the upper end of the vertical post, rising from his head, forms with the title-board a second and smaller cross, an effect much like that in the Florence drawing (Fig. 3). See A. Grabar, Ampoules de Terre Sainte (Monza-Bobbio), Paris, 1958, pls. xxxiv, xxxv.



tangent to the cross nimbus of Christ.48a Here only the bust of Christ is represented, surmounting the bare cross. This form of the scene is exceptional among the ampullae;48b but on one example in Bobbio (Fig. 8) where the bust is set in a great circle at the intersection of the limbs of the cross, the upper vertical of the cross with the title-board rises through that circle above Christ's nimbed head as a separate cross.48C

The cross nimbus with the title-board, which seems to proclaim the royalty of Christ (and perhaps reflects also the interest in the relics of the cross as objects of cult), was one of several variants of the cross nimbus before the medieval type was fixed. To the fifth century belong both the nimbus enclosing the simple cross or Chi-Rho monogram inscribed cbove Christ's head and the examples of these emblems behind his head without a nimbus. From none of these variants would we infer the existence of the monogram or cross as a symbol above Christ's head before the time when the nimbus was first used. The nimbus is an older pagan form adopted by Christian artists in the fourth century as a sign of majesty and distinction, like the emperor's nimbus during the same period; and the earliest known examples of the cross or monogram associated with the image of Christ, but without a nimbus, are, as we have said, broadly contemporary with the latter.

If we look in the same context of the Entry into Jerusalem for another instance of the separate crosslet above Christ's head as part of a nimbus with a larger virtual cross, we shall find it in a work of the thirteenth century, one of a series of wood panels from the church of Mu'Allaka in Old Cairo, now in the British Museum (Fig. 9). Among the various subjects from the Gospels represented on the panels, only the Entry into Jerusalem shows this form; in the others Christ has the standard cross nimbus.49 In the Entry five radial bands issue from behind Christ's head, below the crosslet. These appear to be the clumsily copied outlines of the usual cross or of a misunderstood monogram cross in the model ;50 but their precise origin or symbolism is less important to us here than the crosslet placed prominently over Christ's head.

This Coptic relief is all the more pertinent to our problem because of the uncommon conception of the scene, with Christ on the ass between the boys in the two trees, remarkably like the Florence miniature. We are unable to define the historical relation between the two works, whether the

Egyptian one depends directly on a recent Syrian model - a possibility supported by the close connections of the Coptic and Syrian churches in the Middle Ages - or whether, con- sidering the many Byzantine features in the series of carved panels, it has been influenced like the Diatessaron miniature by Byzantine art, and owes the idea of the crosslet above the head and within the nimbus to a native assimilation of the Greek patriarchal cross, independent of a Syrian model.51

Even if we did not have these examples through which to explain the form in the miniature, we would still question Nordenfalk's reasoning. That the existence of a cross over the head of a deceased lay figure in an image of the third century implies a model of that early period for any later representation of a Gospel scene with this element, is an unwarranted deduction. Would he infer that the mosaics of the arch of Santa Maria Maggiore, dated by an inscription in the fifth century, reproduce a model of the second or third because of the cross over Christ's head? There is a decisive counter-example in a Coptic fresco of the sixth or seventh century from Saqqara, in which a cross is similarly set above a saint's head in a halo. It is the image of the Abbot Apollo, the founder of the monastery at Bawit, who died in 395.52 If we followed Nordenfalk's reasoning we would have to believe that this picture of the saint reproduced a model of the second or third century A.D.

A third argument of Nordenfalk (pages 127-128) for an early model of the scene as a whole is its likeness to the Roman image of the emperor's advent. This comparison hardly stands up when we place the miniature beside Roman coins that represent the imperial Adventus.53 If the earliest known versions of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem - works of the fourth and fifth century - do agree with the pagan advent in several features - the profile of Christ mounted astride, the figures at the city gate welcoming him as he approaches from the left54 - none of these details appears in the Florence miniature. There Christ, sitting frontally on the ass which moves from right to left, is framed by two trees with figures who pluck palms. For Christ's frontal posture Nordenfalk cites examples of the second century in images of Syrian divinities. But both the frontal and profile riders - sitting astride - occur in the West as well as the East, in both Greek and Oriental art and in pagan as well as Christian works; the continuity proves nothing about the date of the Christian prototype.

48a Catalogue of the Byzantine and Early Mediaeval Antiquities in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, I, ed. Marvin C. Ross, Washington, D.C., 1962, pl. XLVIIIA, No. 87. 48b See A. Grabar, Ampoules. 48C Ibid., pl. xxxv, No. 4. All four limbs cross the outline of the medallion; this may be a source of the cross nimbus with the lines of the cross extending beyond the nimbus. 49 For the series of panels, see British Museum, A Guide to the Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities, 1921, pl. xIII; H. Gltick, Die Christliche Kunst des Ostens, Berlin, 1923, pl. 59; 0. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology, Oxford, 191 I, fig. 95 (for Baptism and Ascension). 50 As on middle-Byzantine ivory-carvings: A. Goldschmidt and K. Weitzmann, Byz. Elfenbeinskulpturen, I, pl. LI, 70 (Lyons) and pl. LXVII, S15 (Krak6w). A cross nimbus with seven bars (three of the cross and four of the X) appears on a silver capsella of the 6th century in the Museo Sacro of the Vatican; Guida IV, pl. 7. 51 That the cross above the head in this work may come from Early Christian art is suggested by examples in the Morgan Library MS 828,

fol. 8v, an Ethiopian Gospel manuscript of the early I5th century; the cross is inscribed there above the heads in haloes of the Virgin and Christchild in the scene of the Presentation. The crosslet over the head and within the nimbus might have been suggested by the upper end of the P in a Chi-Rho monogram in an early model. 52 See A. Grabar, Martyrium, Album, Paris, 1943, pl. LIX, I (after Quibbell); the fresco is now in the Cairo Museum and has lost much of the upper part including the cross in the halo; see the color plate in K. Wessel, Koptische Kunst, Recklinghausen, 1963, pl. x, page 181. Two other crosses are placed above the saint's shoulder. 53 See E. Kantorowicz, "The King's Advent," Art Bulletin, xxvI, 1944, 207-231, figs. 7, 8, 12-20. 54 Cf. the sarcophagi of Adelphia in Syracuse (W. F. Volbach, Early Christian Art, New York, 1961, pls. 37, 38) and Junius Bassus (pl. 41), and others reproduced by J. Wilpert, I sarcofagi cristiani antichi, Rome, 1929, pl. ccxxxv; also a relief in Constantinople and the ivory book cover in Milan (Volbach, pls. 81, Ioo).


Io Syriac Lectionary, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem. Vatican Libr. Borgia 169, fol. 64v (from Nordenfalk, Art Bulletin, L, 1968, fig. 30)

x2 Book of Antidotes, Healing of a Man Bitten by a Snake. Vienna, Nat. Bibl. A. F. 10, fol. 2v (from F. R. Martin, The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey, London, I9I2, 11, p. 4)

i i Syriac Lectionary, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem and The Four Evangelists. London, Brit. Mus. Or. 3372, fol. 5 (courtesy Museum)

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A more important question that Nordenfalk has failed to consider is the place of this type of Entry in the larger de- velopment of the images of this common subject. The conception, as Nordenfalk admits, is closest to that of the already cited miniature in the Syriac lectionary, Vatican Borgia MS 169, which is dated 1577 and copies a manuscript of the thirteenth century (Fig. io). The frontal Christ, the ass, the two trees with the boys, are very similar to these elements in our drawing. If the latter lacks the usual figures who spread their robes before Christ, we may regard this as a reductive omission rather than as a sign of an ancient model that lacked this detail.

Such a reduction of the scene is not surprising in the work of an unskilled copyist whose other drawings are so sparse and sometimes vague in details. Yet one recognizes even in this reduced form the characteristics of a type of Entry that in better hands was already a simplified version of the familiar content of the scene. Millet long ago noted in late Byzantine art a tendency towards a more concise image of this subject, which he traced in subsequent Syrian, Armen- ian and Coptic works. Among these he cited the Borgia manuscript 169 and the thirteenth-century wood panel from the Coptic church of Mu'Allaka near Cairo, with the peculiar cross-nimbus that we have discussed before. He remarked, too, that the importance given to the children in the trees was not based on the Gospels but arose in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, influenced in part by the apocryphal Acts of Pilate which tells of the boys plucking the branches.55

The character and ancestry of this miniature may be approached from another angle: the relation to liturgy. The choice of the Entry alone from all the episodes of the Gospels recounted in the Diatessaron is explained by the native cult. In the medieval West, when the selection is limited to a single scene, we expect a Crucifixion or Resurrection.56 But the Entry into Jerusalem has a special importance in the Syro- Mesopotamian churches. In those churches Palm Sunday marks the opening of the liturgical year and is a great folk festival celebrated by a procession outside the church. The bishop rides on an ass through the town and re-enacts Christ's entry into Jerusalem. This ritual of Palm Sunday, with the blessing of the branches, is not recorded in the documents of the Church of the second and third centuries

but is first noted in the detailed account of the rites in Jerusalem by the pilgrim Etheria about 385. Since it is not mentioned by Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, in his work, Catecheses, describing the ceremonies of Holy Week in his church about 348, it is reasonable to suppose, as the students of liturgy have done, that the Easter procession was instituted at some time between 348 and 385. From Jerusalem it was brought to Edessa in Mesopotamian Syria about 500, and at the same period was introduced into the Persian Church. In a Syriac lectionary of about 500-0 I, the feast of Easter Sunday is still called "The Sunday of the Great Week of Unleavened Bread" and not "The Sunday of the Hosannas" or "of the Order of the Consecration of the Olive Branches" (British Museum Add. 17128) as was the custom in later lectionaries.57 It is therefore improbable that the scene of the Entry in the Florence manuscript, with the children in the trees, reproduces a model of the second century.

The Entry is most likely based on a model much later than A.D. 400, if not of the thirteenth century. The oldest surviving Syriac example of this subject, the miniature in the Rabula Gospels, dated 586, is conceived quite differently. It lacks the symmetrical pair of trees with the children plucking the palm branches, a motif represented with the same formality in pictures of the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.58 It is in Syriac lectionaries of the thirteenth century that we find the clearest parallels to the Tatian miniature, with the movement from right to left, and the frontal Christ in the middle between two trees (Fig. 1).59

A detail of the drawing of the ass makes it still more probable that the model of both the Florence and the Vatican miniatures was a Syro-Mesopotamian work of the thirteenth century. It is the little circles or disks marking the joints of the ass's legs. (We shall return to this detail in dis- cussing the relations to Insular art.)60 In the Middle East one can trace this familiar motif back to old Oriental art where, in accord perhaps with a widespread primitive con- cern for the joints and particularly the knees as the places of vital spirits and generative powers, these parts received a prominent articulation.61 The motif is not found in the same scene in the Rabula Gospels or the Etschmiadzin Gospels and related ivory book covers of the sixth century which, though attributed to Syria, have been shaped largely by late

55 G. Millet, Recherches sur l'iconographie de 1'Evangile, Paris, 1916, 261, 262, 282, 283, and figs. 238, 249, 250. He also cites as examples Paris, Bibl. Nat. syr. 344 and 355, and some Armenian works. On the class of manuscripts like Borgia 169, see Leroy, pages 407, 408, and pls. 150, 4 and 153, 1. The figures laying their robes before Christ are generally omitted in Ethiopian manuscripts of the 15th and i6th centuries even in pictures of the Entry with many palm-bearing figures, which are spread across two pages (cf. Pierpont Morgan Library Ms 828, fols. iiv-12r). Mrs. Heldman of Washington University, St. Louis, has shown me photos of a similar Entry in a manuscript in the Library of Addis Ababa and in a destroyed manuscript of I361 formerly in the monastery of Maryam in Debra. See also J. Leroy, Ethiopian Painting..., New York, 1967, pl. vIII. 56 The choice of the Entry as the sole Gospel subject appears also in an Armenian evangile of 1211 from Haghbat (Matenadaran Ms 6288; L. A. Durnovo, Miniatures ArmeniEnnes, 83. See below, 518 and Fig. 18 for this miniature. 57 On the history of the Palm Sunday festival in the Syrian churches see A. Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, London, 1958, 148-I50, and his

articles cited there. Also F. C. Burkitt, "The Early Syriac Lectionary System," Proceedings of the British Academy, xI, 1923, and W. Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts, British Museum, London, I, 1870, 227a. A sign of the connection with the Palm Sunday ritual is the inscription on the margin of a picture of the Entry in London, Brit. Mus. Rich. 7174 (Leroy, 397 and pl. 153, I): "the ceremony of the Entry of our Lord in Jerusalem." 58 Cf. Vatican syr. 559 (Leroy, pl. 86), Brit. Mus. Add. 7170, dated 1216-1220 (pl. 86), and Or. 3372 (pl. 66). 59 See the examples cited in the preceding note and especially Brit. Mus. Or. 3372 where the ass has the same posture and joint marks as in the Florence miniature, and where there are similar trees. See our Figure I I. 60 See below, p. 529- 61 See R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1953, 174ff-; W. Deonna, "Le genou, siege de force et de vie et sa protection magique," Revue Archdologique, xIII, 1939, 224ff.; Carl Schuster, Jointmarks: a Possible Index of Cultural Contact between America, Oceania and the Far East, Amster- dam, 1951.



classical art. But in Armenian sculptures of the tenth cen-

tury and in Persian and Byzantine textiles of the same

period animals are often designed with large circles on the

joints.62 The most striking examples, closest to our miniature, are those in Moslem miniatures from the Bagdad and

neighboring schools of the thirteenth century. In the one

reproduced here (Fig. 12), from a manuscript of the pseudo- Galen in Vienna, the ass is clearly of the same pictorial family as the beast in the Florence and Borgia miniatures.63

One cannot help noting the peculiar hinged or pivoted shape of these joints in the Diatessaron miniatures. They recall the leather puppets of the Oriental shadow theater. The scribe who drew the ass perhaps knew this art and was influenced by its conventions. The shadow puppet theater flourished in the Bagdad-Mosul region from which might have come the Syriac manuscript of the Diatessaron used in the thirteenth century by the Persian translator.64

The connection with the art of this time in the Middle East is intimated by other elements of the miniature of the

Entry. The conception of the rider between two trees and the specific form of the trees, with their ornamentally pat- terned leaves, are found in the decoration of Rayy ceramics as well as on pottery and miniatures of the Bagdad school

(Fig. 12).65 But the placing of the trees and figures in overlapping layers in depth suggests a Byzantine factor - it is a feature of Greek style assimilated in the Moslem art of that same region.

All these details indicate that a miniature of the twelfth or thirteenth century served, directly or at second-hand, as a model of the scene for the copyist in 1547. The occurrence of so many details of the Entry in Syriac lectionaries of this later period, which contain Passion harmonies related to Tatian's text, favors the idea that the artist of the Diatessa- ron borrowed his image from a lectionary.66 That such a model existed around 1200o is evident from the painting of the Entry in a Syriac lectionary of that time in the British Museum, as Or. 3372 (Fig. II). Christ sits frontally, with extended right hand, on an ass moving to the left. As in the

Diatessaron, Christ is framed by two trees in each of which a figure plucks branches. The nose of the ass touches the left tree, and the right tree rises from the ass's back, precisely as in the later drawing. On the legs of the beast are curved markings that a copyist might reproduce as circular

joints. Remove the other figures from the scene and we have a convincing model of the Diatessaron miniature.67

We come finally to the argument that the conception of

13 Evangelary, detail of canon table. Venice, Mekhitarist Libr. MS 1635, fol. 5v (from Der Nersessian, Les Manuscrits Armrniens, ii, pl. xxiI)

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14 Qazvini, The Wonders of the World, The Symbols of the Four Evangelists. Leningrad, Lib. of Academy of Sciences (from Pope, Survey of Persian Art, v, pl. 854A)

62 See S. Der Nersessian, Aght'amar: Church of the Holy Cross, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, pls. 50, 51. For textiles cf. the silk from Mozat (Lyons, Musee des Tissus; C. Diehl, Manuel d'art byzantin, Paris, 1925, II, fig. 313), the shroud of St. Siviard (Sens, Treasure of the Cathedral; Rice and Hirmer, The Art of Byzantium, pl. '13), the elephant silk in the Treasure of Aachen Cathedral (Rice, pl. 130). Cf. also examples in Armenian miniatures: Venice, Mekhitarist Library Ms 1917 (Der Nersessian, Manuscrits Armdniens, pl. XLIX, No. io8), and Washington, D.C., Freer Gallery, Ms 43.3 (Der Nersessian, Armenian Manuscripts in the Freer, pl. 5). 63 Vienna, National Library MS A.F.Io, fol. 2, the Book of Antidotes. On the manuscript see Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 91, 96. Horses very much like the ass of the Florence miniature in outline and articulation and with tail similarly crossed by the left hind leg appear in a miniature of the Nativity in an Armenian evangel of 1332 from the Lake Van region; L. Durnovo, Miniatures Armdniennes, 159.

64 See Paul Kahle, "Islamische Schattenspielfiguren aus Agypten," Der Islam, I, I9Io, 264 ff., pl. 7, fig. 4, page 269; fig. 5, page 270; fig. 13, page 280, etc. 65 Pope and Ackerman, Survey of Persian Art, v, pls. 632, 633, 638, 654, 655, 692C (Rayy ware); Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, 122, 129, 134. 66 Cf. Vatican syr. 559 (Leroy, pl. 86, 2) and London, Brit. Mus. Add. MS 7 170 (Leroy, pl. 86, I), both of the I3th century, and the lectionaries of the i6th: Borgia MS 169 (Nordenfalk, fig. 30) and Jerusalem, Library of the Holy Sepulchre, MS I (fig. 31). 67 On this manuscript see Leroy, 261-67. Leroy has noted the strong influence of the art of Moslem Bagdad in this manuscript, and in the Entry miniature the resemblance of the tree and leaf patterns to those in miniatures of the Paris Hariri (Bibl. Nat. arabe 5847) and other Bagdad manuscripts, though without reference to the page in Florence.



Christ enthroned on an ass belongs to a monarchic and therefore "terrestrial" iconography - a kind of Majestas Domini appropriate to Tatian and his time. Nordenfalk (pages 127, 128) attributes to Tatian priority among early Church writers in speaking of God as emperor in his well- known Apology. But this conception of God was already a commonplace in both pagan and Christian literature before Tatian and continued long after, as Erik Peterson has shown in a basic work Ets 19ed.68 Even if it were correct to inter- pret the Entry in the Florence miniature as monarchic in spirit and as an example of a "terrestrial" iconography in contrast to a "celestial" one that became standard in the fourth and fifth centuries, this would not justify a dating of its prototype in the time of Tatian. On the contrary, we have learned from numerous studies that in painting and sculpture the monarchic attributes of Christ were developed in the fourth to sixth century in close dependence on the image of the Roman and Byzantine emperor.69

In proposing the "terrestrial" interpretation of the Christ of the Entry, Nordenfalk has underplayed a significant element of the scene, the yellow arched canopy over Christ's head, which he characterizes as "evidently a special form of distinction" (page 127). Unsupported and unlocalized, this floating form above an equestrian figure seems to have no sense as an actuality of the represented scene; it is unique in images of the Entry. Its position and shape make it unlikely that the canopy is a misunderstood residue of the arch of a city-gate in an ancient model of the drawing or a reduction of an arch framing the entire scene. It may be explained, however, as an emblem of Christ's kingship, borrowed from Arab and Persian medieval art where the ruler is often represented enthroned under a canopy70 and where a canopy-like parasol is held over his head when he

rides on a horse.71 The connection with native art of the twelfth to the sixteenth century in which examples of the royal canopy (and parasol) are found supports the view suggested by other features of the Entry; like these it points to a model of the later medieval period.

In view of this canopy the distinction drawn by Norden- falk between the "terrestrial" and "celestial" in Christian themes appears even less pertinent.72 In ancient and medieval art a canopy or baldaquin above a ruler was an obvious celestial symbol. In the East especially, where since early Babylon the sky was described as a canopy and where the association of the ruler and heaven was tradi- tional and the throne was set under a heavenly dome or ceiling, the celestial import of the canopy in our miniature would have been evident.73 Its yellow color probably replaced the gold that was usual for imperial canopies and the symbols of heaven. To characterize the conception of Christ in the Entry as "terrestrial" because of the imperial aspect and to deduce from this a dating of the model in the second century is to miss the close connection of the imperial and celestial in the thinking of both the ancient and medieval Oriental world.

If the Christ of the Entry is terrestrial, how shall one characterize the miniature of the four zoa who belong to John's and Ezekiel's visions of heaven (Fig. 4)? The accompanying inscriptions that match these creatures, as symbols of the evangelists, with the four rivers of Paradise and their four liquids, are taken from post-Biblical visionary writings which will be discussed presently. On this page, too, a yellow arched canopy is set above the scheme of Para- dise.

Even if one granted that both images conveyed a "terrestrial" concept, it would not confirm a connection with

68 E. Peterson, EIE OEOE, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, xxIv, G6ttingen, 1926, and the same author's Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem, Leipzig, 1935, 48ff. and passim. Already in the Gospels (Matthew 21:5) Christ's Entry is described as a fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah (9: 2): "Behold thy king cometh unto thee, meek and sitting upon an ass." Remarkably, while deriving the conception of the scene directly from a pagan imperial advent on page 127, Nordenfalk is able to say on the next page, in explaining the choice of the Entry as a "terrestrial theme," that the idea of a heaven in the clouds was too pagan for Christians of Tatian's time, who were still counting on Christ's return, and was therefore unsuitable for an image of Christ. If Tatian in his Apology speaks of God as a ruler, he has another attitude to the royal in the earthly life of Jesus. Messina, Diatessaron Persiano, LXXXVIIIff., has noted a tendency of Tatian in his text of the Diatessaron to remove or reduce passages that refer to Christ as king. So in John 1:49: "Thou art the Son of God, thou art the king of Israel," Tatian omits the second part. Likewise in Matthew 27: 1 1, Mark 15:2, Luke 23:3, and the second part of John 19:21. In Matthew 6:33: "But seek ye first the kingdom of God" is replaced by "seek ye celestial grace." Tatian omits altogether the parable of the kingdom of God on earth, Luke 19: 1-27. 69 See H. P. L'Orange, Studies on the Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World, Oslo, 1953 and esp. 124-197; also A. Grabar, L'empereur dans l'art Byzantin, Paris, 1936. 70 See the examples reproduced by E. Blochet, Musulman Painting, XIIth-XVIIth century, London, 1929, pls. XLV, XLVII (Tabriz, ca. 1310), xcvi (Herat, 1485), XCIX (I486), cx (1543). An analogous conception in Arab miniatures of the 13th century from a Syrian center are the angels holding an arched cloth over the haloed heads of Mohammed, an enthroned ruler, and other worthies, including a mounted chieftain; see B. Fares, "Vision chretienne et signes musulmans," Memoires de l'Institut d'Egypte, LVI, I96I, pls. I, vmII, x-xu, and pages 72, 77, 86, 95. This motif is perhaps derived from the classic personification of Coelus which

also entered Christian art, as in the figure under the enthroned Christ on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (F. Gerke, Der Sarkophagus des lunius Bassus, Berlin, 1936, pl. 5). For the cloth canopy or veil as an image of heaven there are parallels in the Old Testament: Psalm 104: 2, Isaiah 40:22. 71 Cf. E. Blochet, Musulman Painting, pls. LXV (Tabriz, ca. 1310o), cxv (Bokhara, 1545), CXXV (Herat, 1526). See also the miniature reproduced by T. Mann, Der Islam Einst und Jetzt, Leipzig, 1914, 134, fig. 145, together with the drawing by Rembrandt in the Louvre, copied from a similar Indo-Persian work. According to B. Spuler, Iran infriihislamischer Zeit, Wiesbaden, 1952, 345, the medieval Persian ruler sat like the old Persian kings under a parasol. An interesting analogue, probably inspired by Oriental practice or art, is the scene of John the Baptist before Herod in the mosaic of the Baptistery in Florence: a servant holds a domical parasol over Herod's head (R. van Marle, Le scuole della pittura italiana, The Hague and Milan, I, 1932, fig. 153)- 72 A further evidence of how inadequate and arbitrary is the distinction between the "terrestrial" and "celestial" in images of Christ as a criter- ion of their date may be judged from the recently discovered mosaic of Christus Helios in the solar chariot on the 3rd-century ceiling under Saint Peter's in Rome. 73 On the domed ceiling, the ruler's canopy and their celestial symbolism, see R. Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, Munich 1910, 11, 613ff., and H. P. L'Orange, Cosmic Kingship, 134-38. The canopy as an image of heaven appears in the scene of the Pentecost in the Rabula Gospels; Leroy, pl. 34. An arch is often centered over Christ in other subjects in Syrian miniatures of the I3th century (London, Brit. Mus. Add. 7170, and Vatican syr. 559; Leroy, pl. 94) with a cloth lying on the dome. In the latter example (the Doubting Thomas) the canopied arch seems to float above Christ, but this effect is due to overlapping by the figures. Here, unlike the Florence miniature, the arch belongs to the setting of the scene, though it has also a connotation of Christ's transcendence.



Tatian himself. For as a theologian of gnostic and ascetic tendency he was more inclined to a spiritualistic view. In composing his harmony of the Gospels he began with the opening of the evangel of John,74 the most theological, "divine," and pneumatistic of the four authors, and in his original text omitted the genealogy of the human ancestors of Christ.75

V Of the four pages of decoration it is the one with the symbols of the evangelists (Fig. 4) that most forcibl

Schapiro, The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaro

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