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Binding
with the Crucifixion and the Anastasis, The Crucifixion
Northern Greek or southern Balkan (?) (Thessalonike?), late
14th–early 15th century
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice (Cl. Gr. I, 55; 967)
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•• Manuscript painting
In the field of manuscript production, the Palaiologan age was
a time of intense scholastic activity in Byzantium, with many
seeking to rediscover long-ignored ancient texts. Scholars searched
for classical writings and then copied and annotated them. Maximos
Planudes (c. 1255–1305), for example, edited Plutarch,
rewrote the Greek Anthology of epigrams, and rediscovered
Ptolemy’s Geography. A remarkable early fifteenth-century
edition of Ptolemy’s
Geography survives today; the text was preserved,
after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, in the collection
of the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet the Conqueror, who was an avid
collector of Byzantine manuscripts. Contact with the West introduced
a range of Latin texts that Greek scholars translated into Greek—from
Ovid and Cicero to Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Manuscripts for service in the church and in private devotion
continued to be widely commissioned, as in previous centuries,
and the most luxurious of these were bound in magnificent silver
gilt bindings, such as the bookcover now preserved in Venice’s
Marciana Library. Gospel books featuring portraits of the four
gospel writers, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John, and psalters,
illustrating the Old
Testament psalms, are among the most important sacred texts
to survive.
Visual Expressions of the Faith
Liturgical Objects | Manuscripts
and Frescoes | Miniature Mosaic Icons
| Vestments and Textiles | Painted
Icons
Themes in Late Byzantine Art
Introduction | Peoples
of the Byzantine Sphere | Visual Expressions of
the Faith | The Byzantine Sphere
and the Islamic World | The
Byzantine Sphere and the West
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