Manuscripts

Although pottery sherds were used as a kind of scrap paper, and wax tablets as notebooks, by far the most significant writing surfaces for Late Antique artistic remains are papyrus and parchment. Similar to manuscripts of papyrus, cut pieces of parchment were sewn together into scrolls before the innovation in the Roman Period of the codex form of the book. For codices, pieces of parchment or papyrus could be folded into folios (one sheet folded so as to make two or four pages) and then sewn together as quires (a gathering of folios or leaves) before they were bound together. There is a particular manner of bookbinding associated with Coptic codices in which folios or quires are sewn through their folds and linked to each other by a line of chain stitching. Codicology is particularly concerned with the book as physical object, its written and ornamental features, how it was constructed or might be reconstructed from rearranged quires, or a given page reconstructed from fragments. The codex form of the book came to predominate over the scroll in the fourth century, although scrolls continued to be used for some ceremonial documents and to be represented as the appropriately ancient form of book held by historical figures.

Although in the strictest sense ‘‘illuminated’’ refers to manuscripts with lustrous metallic, typically gold, decorations, illumination is also used in a more general sense to refer to any kind of painting on a manuscript, whether marginal ornamentation, decorated initial letters, or larger compositions. Manuscript paintings are also called miniatures to distinguish between the small scale of painting in books and painting in other formats, mainly that of wall painting, referred to as monumental. The Glazier Codex (Pierpont Morgan Library, G67), still preserved in its original covers of wooden boards, presents an early example of a full-page miniature (Bober 1967). At the end of the text of the first fifteen books of the Acts of the Apostles is a composition in yellow, red, and brown of an ankh version of the cross (crux ansata) ornamented with interlaced motifs and peacocks (symbols of resurrection). This manuscript is dated to the turn of the fifth century by the particular uncial forms of the letters. Of course, not all codices were heavily painted. A well-executed drawing on parchment depicts an unusual portrayal of Job as a royal figure - wearing a crown - with his daughters, wearing jewels and diadems (folio 4 verso; Spatharikis 1976:14-20). This composition is unusual among contemporary representations for emphasizing Job’s eventual success rather than his suffering. This is one of the surviving eight folios of a seventh-century (?) manuscript preserving the text from Job 40:8 to Proverbs 3:19 (Naples, Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele III, MS 1 B 18) written in Coptic uncials.

The flat, unrolled page of the codex may have allowed for thicker applications of paint, and the facing pages (the back, verso, facing the front, recto, of the following page) encouraged relations across pages and throughout the book (Weitzmann 1977). The expressive purposes of manuscript illumination range from diagrammatic (e. g., rendering key features for identification of a medicinal plant in a herbal), to narrative and representational (the charioteers of the Charioteer Papyrus; the Job composition), to symbolic (the ankh in the Glazier Codex). These expressive purposes may overlap (as in the narrative and symbolic representations of ‘‘holy Theophilus’’ in the Alexandrian World Chronicle and Job in the Naples manuscript).

Paintings and drawings for the transmission of designs to artisans may not have been stored in book form. This category of evidence (McKenzie 2007; Stauffer 2008) has only recently attracted scholarly attention, and it is not yet known how they were organized for storage within workshops, whether clients referred to them as they negotiated their commissions, or how artisans might have referred to them during the processes of production.