Codex Aureus, the most famous and important illuminated medieval western manuscript located in a Romanian collection, at the Batthyaneum Library in Alba Iulia, central-western Hunedoara County, entered the UNESCO List, becoming part of the Memory of the World fund, announced, Thursday evening, the National Library of Romania, on the institution's Facebook page.
Known generically as the Codex Aureus, being written in gold ink, the over 1,200-year-old manuscript appears in the inventory over time under five or six different names, hence the speculation that it would not have been classified.
The Codex Aureus or the Gospel of Lorsch is half of a Latin Tetraevangelion on parchment, made at the order of Charlemagne, probably at the Schola Palatina in Aachen, in the year 810.
The manuscript written entirely in gold ink is also famous for the exceptional quality of the ornamentation: 202 pages decorated with polychrome friezes, 12 pages of illustrated biblical canons, 3 full-page paintings, two of which representing the portraits of the evangelists Matthew and Mark, an illuminated frontispiece and two other pages with ornamental writing, as revealed by the presentation made on the website of the National Library of Romania. Moreover, here it can also be browsed digitally.
It is not known when and how the Carolingian manuscript was unfolded in two. The other half, the Gospels according to Luke and John, are in the Vatican. One of the covers is also in Rome, the second one is in a museum in London.
In the middle of the 18th century, the first part of the manuscript belonged to the library of the archbishop of Vienna, Christoforo Migazzi, from where, by purchase, in 1782, it became the property of bishop Batthyany and thus arrived at Alba Iulia.
The manuscript is stored in the room called Treasury, in fact an armored room, being kept under special conditions and periodically checked from the point of view of its preservation.
Along with the Codex Aureus, the Biblioteca Documenta Batthyaneum houses the most valuable collection of Western medieval manuscripts in Romania, as well as the largest collection of incunabula.AGERPRES
Comentează