![]() “Manuscript migration”, De Hamel calls it. Dealers and collectors of one stripe or another have sent calligraphic masterworks to places far from home. Of the 12 manuscripts investigated by him in his delightful, absorbing book, only one – the medieval Hours of Jeanne de Navarre – is preserved today in the country where it was created. (The deal was vetoed at the 11th hour after the cleric pitched too high.) Might-have-been moments in the lives of manuscripts are familiar to De Hamel, who for 25 years worked for Sotheby’s. (Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was anachronistic.)Īccording to manuscript historian Christopher de Hamel, Rossano’s gospel book was kept in a box in the archdeacon’s bedroom until 1889, when a classicist from England arrived to buy it. ![]() ![]() In Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem at that time, tables neatly laid with plates and rolls of bread were not known. ( was on display when I visited in 1988 we shall be dead before the last page.) Strikingly, in the Last Supper scene, the disciples are shown eating with their fingers at a low, eastern-style table. Each year, with great solemnity, the cathedral authorities turn a page for public view. The Codex Purpureus Rossanensis – 185 pages of purple-dyed vellum – gleams with gold whorls and Byzantine interlace. A remote town in southern Italy, Rossano, is home to a sixth-century Greek manuscript illustrating the life of Christ.
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