Codex Egberti

Introduction: A Book’s Claim to Significance

Among the illuminated manuscripts that survive from the Ottonian tenth century, few carry a claim to primacy as concrete and as consequential as the Codex Egberti, the Gospel lectionary preserved today in the Stadtbibliothek of Trier (the Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek der Stadt Trier) as Hs. 24. Its distinction is not merely that it is beautiful, though it is among the most refined products of its age, nor merely that it was made for one of the most powerful churchmen of the late tenth-century Empire. Its distinction is that it contains the earliest surviving extensive narrative cycle of the life of Christ in a Western medieval book: fifty-one framed miniatures running from the Annunciation to the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, integrated into the liturgical text they accompany. This is not a devotional afterthought bound into a Gospel book but a sustained pictorial theology, an unprecedented visual argument set out page by page across the church year.

That single fact has shaped the manuscript’s fortunes ever since. The codex is item J in the group nomination “Illuminated manuscripts from the Ottonian period produced in the monastery of Reichenau (Lake Constance)”, which the UNESCO Memory of the World Register records as inscribed in 2003; the page of the Trier library gives 2004. The nomination form submitted by Germany describes the book as a vellum manuscript of c. 977–93, of 165 leaves measuring 270 × 210 mm, with a modern binding, and gives its shelfmark as Cod. 24; the library itself writes Hs. 24, and the form’s bibliography and many facsimile descriptions write Ms. 24.

The manuscript announces its own nature and its own patron with unusual directness. It calls itself a liber evangeliorum, and it opens with a dedicatory poem and a portrait of Archbishop Egbert of Trier (in office 977–993), the churchman whose name it bears and for whom it was made. It is, in the technical sense, an evangelistary or Perikopenbuch: a book containing not the continuous text of the four Gospels but the pericopes, the excerpts read at Mass, arranged in the order of the liturgical year. Books of this type had come into being in the ninth century; what the Codex Egberti did with the type was new.

The essay that follows sets out to describe the manuscript in full — its physical make-up, its images and inscriptions, its liturgical purpose, its long afterlife — and to situate it within the scholarly debates that have surrounded it for more than a century. Those debates are not marginal. They concern the most basic questions one can ask of a medieval book: where it was made, by whom, from what models, and to what end.

The Codex Egberti has become a test case for the whole problem of the so-called “Reichenau school” of Ottonian illumination, and for the identity and reach of the anonymous artist known as the Gregory Master. In each of these areas the manuscript is surrounded by claims that are securely documented, by claims that represent a broad scholarly consensus, by hypotheses that remain open, and by errors that are endlessly repeated. Part of the purpose here is to keep those categories distinct — to say what the book tells us, what scholars have inferred, what remains genuinely uncertain, and what has simply been got wrong.

For a specialist readership the Codex Egberti rewards close attention precisely because it sits at the hinge of so many larger stories: the transmission of Late Antique and Byzantine picture traditions into the Latin West; the political theology of the Ottonian imperial church; the rivalry of the great archiepiscopal sees; and the emergence, around the year 1000, of the narrative image as a vehicle for exegesis. It is a book that repays being read as an object, as a picture cycle, and as a document of its historical moment all at once.

Historical Context: Ottonian Trier and Egbert as Patron

To understand the Codex Egberti one must first understand its patron and the world in which he operated. Egbert was born around 950 into the highest ranks of the northern aristocracy, a son of Count Dirk (Theoderich) II of Holland¹ and of Hildegard², who is generally identified as a daughter of Count Arnulf I of Flanders. He was educated at Egmond Abbey, the house founded and controlled by his own family, and — according to the tradition preserved in the older biographical literature — was formed further in the orbit of the imperial court. By 976 he had risen to become chancellor of the Emperor Otto II³, holding the office at the head of the imperial chancery; the following year, in 977, still probably in his twenties, he was appointed Archbishop of Trier. He would hold the see until his death on 9 December 993.

Egbert’s career unfolded against the turbulent politics of the Ottonian succession. He accompanied Otto II to Italy in 980 and again in 983, journeys that mattered enormously for the artistic culture he would go on to sponsor, since they brought him and his circle into direct contact with Italian, Early Christian, and Byzantine works of art. When Otto II died suddenly in 983, leaving the infant Otto III as heir, Egbert threw his support behind Henry the Quarrelsome, Duke of Bavaria, in the contest for control of the young king and the regency. This was a serious political misjudgement, and Egbert reversed it: by 985 he had returned to the party of Otto III and his mother, the Empress Theophanu. The reconciliation left traces in the objects Egbert commissioned, some of which appear to have functioned as instruments of political repair as much as of devotion.

The see over which Egbert presided was no ordinary bishopric. Trier claimed to be the oldest Christian community in the German lands and, crucially, an apostolically founded church: its first bishop, according to Trier’s own tradition, had been sent by Saint Peter himself. This claim to indirect Petrine authority placed Trier in direct competition with Mainz and Cologne, the other two great archiepiscopal sees of the East Frankish realm, each of which advanced its own case for pre-eminence within the emerging German church. Under Egbert, Trier set out to rival and where possible outshine its competitors in the splendour and the theological pointedness of its art.

Egbert was, by any measure, one of the most important clerical patrons of the Ottonian age. He established one or more workshops of goldsmiths and enamellers at Trier whose products were sought by other Ottonian centres and by the imperial court itself. Three major works of metalwork associated with his patronage survive. The first is the so-called Egbert Shrine, the portable altar and reliquary of Saint Andrew now in the Treasury of Trier Cathedral. It is often described as the earliest known “speaking reliquary” in the shape of a body part, for its lid bears an almost life-sized golden foot referring to its principal relic.

It is worth correcting a persistent tourist-brochure error here: the reliquary does not contain a whole sandal but, as the cathedral’s own custodians have confirmed, only a fragment of the strap of Saint Andrew’s sandal, together with relics of Saint Peter and others. The second is the staff-reliquary of Saint Peter, now in the Treasury of Limburg Cathedral, whose enamel plaques pair portraits of the apostles with the earliest bishops of Trier, and popes with later bishops — a visual genealogy asserting Trier’s apostolic descent. The third survival is the metalwork later reused on the treasure binding of the Codex Aureus of Echternach, some fifty years after Egbert’s death; this had been donated by the Empress Theophanu, and it has plausibly been suggested that the original object was given to Theophanu and Otto III to mark Egbert’s reconciliation with them in 985.

The same themes that animate the metalwork run through Egbert’s manuscripts. He commissioned the compilation of the Registrum Gregorii, an edition of the letters of Pope Gregory the Great⁴, and had a magnificently illuminated copy made. He commissioned, or received, the small Egbert Psalter now in Cividale, in which the scribe Ruodprecht is shown presenting the book to Egbert, who in turn presents it to Saint Peter — a compact statement of the Petrine authority of Trier. And he commissioned the Codex Egberti. Across these works the recurrent motifs are the same: the promotion of Trier’s apostolic claims, the alignment of the archbishop with Saint Peter and the imperial house, and the deployment of the most sophisticated art available in the service of both. Egbert also undertook a substantial programme of ecclesiastical building and reform within his diocese, restoring and endowing houses such as St Eucharius (later St Matthias), St Paulinus, and St Maria ad Martyres, and reforming the abbey of Mettlach. He was buried, according to the tradition preserved in the biographical literature, in the chapel of Saint Andrew that he had built beside the cathedral of Trier.

It is against this background — a wealthy, ambitious, well-travelled prince of the church, deeply invested in art as an instrument of authority, and presiding over a see with grand claims to make — that the Codex Egberti must be read. The book is not simply a liturgical tool. It is a monument of Egbert’s episcopate, and its images and inscriptions repay reading as such.

Codicology and Physical Description

The Codex Egberti is a parchment manuscript of modest but dignified format, measuring 270 by 210 millimetres — the dimension recorded consistently across the facsimile documentation of the original. Its extent is usually given as 165 leaves, and this is the figure recorded in the UNESCO nomination form; some descriptions, including the codicological summary produced for the facsimile trade, give 166 folios. The discrepancy is small and turns on the counting of flyleaves and the front matter; both figures circulate in reputable sources. The book is written in Caroline minuscule⁵, the clear and disciplined script that the Carolingian reform had established as the norm for Latin book production and that the Ottonian scriptoria inherited and maintained. The palaeographical analysis has identified at least two scribes at work in the main text.

The decorative apparatus of the writing is itself lavish. The rubrics that identify the feast days are written in gold or in red, generally in Rustic Capitals, the antique display script whose revival was part of the deliberate classicism of Ottonian book art. The opening words of each pericope are customarily set in Uncial, another script borrowed from Late Antiquity for its dignity. The manuscript contains more than two hundred decorated initials, executed in gold, in silver, and in an orange-red ink derived from lead (minium). Two full-page incipit pages present gold lettering on purple grounds, and one of these carries a monogrammatic opening word — the word cum — formed of gold and silver interlace with leafy vines. This combination of gold and silver script on purple parchment consciously evokes the luxury books of Late Antiquity and of the Carolingian court, and it signals from the outset that this is a book made without regard to cost.

The programme of full-page and framed decoration, as catalogued in the modern codicological description, comprises one full-page painted dedication inscription; one full-page portrait of Egbert; four full-page evangelist portraits; two full-page painted incipit pages; a single painted headpiece; the more than two hundred initials already mentioned; and the fifty-one Gospel miniatures that are the manuscript’s glory. It is at exactly this point that one of the most tenacious errors in the popular literature needs to be addressed.

The Codex Egberti is very frequently said to contain “fifty-six” or “sixty” miniatures. Both figures are wrong as descriptions of the Christ cycle. They arise from a confusion between the count of narrative scenes and the count of decorated pages: the UNESCO nomination form, for instance, records the manuscript as having “60 decorated pages, including 8 full-page miniatures depicting archbishop Egbert and the four evangelists, a page with a decorated initial, and 51 illustrations to the gospels, the earliest cycle of this kind.” The number of narrative Gospel miniatures — the scenes of the life of Christ — is fifty-one. Fifty-six appears to be a further garbling of the same figures. The distinction matters, because it is precisely the fifty-one narrative scenes, and not the frontispieces or the ornamental pages, that constitute the manuscript’s claim to historical primacy.

The miniatures vary in size and are framed in bands of red and gold. Their most celebrated visual feature is the treatment of the backgrounds: rather than the flat burnished-gold grounds that would dominate later Ottonian and Romanesque illumination, many of the Codex Egberti’s scenes unfold against soft, graded, atmospheric grounds, often described as “cloud-like,” in which bands of colour shade gently from lighter above to darker below. This handling of the pictorial field, at once abstract and evocative of real space and light, is also one of the features that scholars have used to distinguish the hands at work in it.

As to the binding, a further common error must be set aside. The Codex Egberti does not preserve an original Ottonian treasure binding of gold and jewels. The codex’s original treasure binding, presumably a work of Egbert’s Trier goldsmiths’ workshop, was lost before 1810, when the manuscript entered the Stadtbibliothek; an eighteenth-century inscription records that the book had been rebound in 1773 with a new cover of silver, gold and stones, so the loss falls between 1773 and 1810. The UNESCO nomination form lists the binding simply as “modern.” When modern facsimile editions present the book in a green silk binding with a silver-plated metal image of Egbert on the cover, that binding is a modern reconstruction — the metal image being modelled on the only surviving depiction of Egbert in metal, found on a reliquary of the True Cross at Mettlach — and not a survival of the medieval object.

Dedication Images and Inscriptions

The Codex Egberti opens, before a single word of Scripture, with a statement of who made the book, who gave it, and who received it. This front matter is among the most historically eloquent parts of the manuscript, and it has been the source of both genuine information and considerable misunderstanding.

“Augia Fausta Tibi”: The Dedication Verses of the Codex Egberti, fol. 1v

Fol. 1v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) forms a double page with the portrait of Archbishop Egbert on fol. 2r, opposite. The codicological description prepared for the 2005 facsimile describes the pair as a dedication inscription written in gold and a portrait of Egbert “on purple backgrounds with tapestry-like embellishments in gold”.

The decoration of the page is rich. An outer frame of blue and gold bands encloses a broad purple border filled with a continuous frieze of small creatures, dragons, birds and beasts. Drawn in gold line, they bite and grasp one another and are woven together with interlacing tendrils. At the corners and along the sides the animals twist into knots, and at the top two of them confront each other across a central interlace. A further frame of thin gold lines separates this border from the inner field. The inner field is of a deeper purple and carries the inscription in gold.

The motif of interlaced animals has roots in Insular and Carolingian ornament. The same border, as the 1884 edition notes, frames the portrait of Egbert on the facing page. The purple and gold, deliberately recalling the luxury books of Late Antiquity and of the Carolingian court, set the tone for the whole sequence of frontispieces that follows.

The inscription consists of three lines of verse, each divided into two lines of writing and separated from the others by blank space. The 1884 edition describes them as three leonine hexameters. The text, preserved in the standard edition of Ottonian Latin verse in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, reads:

HUNC EGB(ER)TE LIBRUM DIVINO DOGMATE PLENU(M) SUSCIPIENDO VALE NEC NON IN S(AE)C(U)LA GAUDE AUGIA FAUSTA TIBI QUE(M) DEFERT P(RAE)SUL HONORI

It may be rendered: “This book, O Egbert, full of divine teaching: as you receive it, fare well, and rejoice for ever. Fortunate Augia presents it to you, O prelate, in your honour.”

The verses are written in gold capitals of a slightly irregular, almost calligraphic character, with mixed letterforms, abbreviation marks over EGB(ER)TE, PLENU(M), S(AE)C(U)LA, QUE(M) and P(RAE)SUL, and small triangular points between words. The text addresses Egbert directly in the vocative. It calls the book “full of divine teaching”, wishes him well, and names its giver: Augia fausta, “fortunate Augia”. As the 1884 edition notes, this is a variant of the usual epithet Augia dives, “rich Augia”, the Latin name of the monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance. The poem thus states, in the manuscript’s own voice, that the book was a gift from Reichenau to the archbishop of Trier. On the facing page, the two monks who present the book, Keraldus and Heribertus, are labelled Augienses, “of Augia”.

The page also has a significant codicological history. The 1884 edition, following the study of the gatherings published three years earlier, reports that the first two gatherings of the codex are not intact. In the first gathering, the original leaf 1 was detached from the bifolium it formed with leaf 8, and the present leaf 1, with the dedication to Egbert, was glued in its place. Leaves 2 and 7 were cut out, and a single leaf, the present fol. 2 with the portrait of Egbert, was inserted.

The nineteenth-century study concluded from this that the manuscript was made ready as a gift for the archbishop only after it had been written. The reconstruction belongs to the nineteenth-century literature.

The recto of the same leaf carries later notes that document the history of the book. According to the 1884 edition, an eighteenth-century inscription records that the codex, given by Egbert to the collegiate church of St Paulinus at Trier, was rebound in 1773 with a new cover of silver, gold and stones. A note in the hand of the librarian Johann Hugo Wyttenbach records its donation to the city library of Trier on 14 March 1810 by the last canon of St Paulinus, Johann Wilhelm Goetten.

Archbishop Egbert Receives the Codex — Dedication Miniature, fol. 2r

The facing page, folio 2r, carries the full-page portrait of the archbishop. Egbert is shown enthroned, seated on a cushioned stool, an inscription in gold naming him and his office. Around his head is a square halo (or nimbus). The square nimbus is a convention inherited from Late Antique and Early Christian art, used to denote a living person of holiness or eminence, as distinct from the round nimbus reserved for saints in glory; its use here is one of several features that scholars have taken as evidence of Italian and Early Christian influence on the art of Egbert’s Trier, whether transmitted through models seen on his Italian journeys or through the mosaics accessible in Trier itself. Flanking the enthroned archbishop are two smaller figures, monks, each identified by an inscription: Keraldus and Heribertus, described as Augienses — “of Augia,” that is, of Reichenau. One of them, Keraldus, hands a golden book up to Egbert; the other, Heribertus, holds a second golden book.

Here precision is essential, because the image has been persistently over-read. It is often stated as settled fact that Keraldus and Heribertus were the scribes and painters of the manuscript, “the two monks of Reichenau who made the book,” and even that they were the artists who executed the fifty-one miniatures. The image itself supports no such claim.

Presentation is not the same as authorship. In the visual language of the Ottonian dedication miniature, the figure who hands over the book may be its scribe, or its donor, or the representative of the community making the gift, or some combination of these; the gesture of presentation is a statement about the transaction of giving, not a signature. To infer from the miniature that Keraldus and Heribertus personally wrote and painted Hs. 24 is to read a modern notion of artistic attribution into a picture that is making a different, more ceremonial point.

The most that can be said with confidence is that the manuscript documents two Reichenau monks as its presenters, and that this establishes a Reichenau connection for the book; whether either man was a scribe or a painter, and if so of what, the image does not tell us. The careful modern codicological descriptions reflect exactly this caution, listing Keraldus and Heribertus as artists and scribes only with a following question mark.

The dedication ensemble, then, gives us three secure facts and one open question. Securely, the book was made for Egbert; securely, it was presented to him; securely, Reichenau is named as the giver. The open question — and it is the central question of the manuscript’s scholarship — is what “presented by Reichenau” actually means for the place of production and the identity of the artists. That question is taken up below. But it is worth noting already that the front matter does something more than record a transaction. By placing the archbishop enthroned and haloed, receiving a divinely-full book from a great imperial abbey, the opening pages make a claim about Egbert himself: that he stands at the point where imperial monasticism, apostolic authority, and sacred learning converge. The dedication is, in miniature, the same argument that Egbert’s reliquaries make in metal.

The Evangelist at Work: The Portrait of Saint Matthew in the Codex Egberti, fol. 3v

The portrait of Saint Matthew on fol. 3v opens the series of four full-page evangelist portraits that follow the dedication pages of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The portraits are arranged in two facing pairs: Matthew on fol. 3v opposite Mark on fol. 4r, and Luke on fol. 5v opposite John on fol. 6r. Each double opening therefore presents two authors of the Gospel turned towards one another. Matthew’s portrait, the first a reader encounters after the image of Egbert himself, sets the tone for the whole series.

The evangelist sits on a massive block-like seat with a red cushion. The 1884 edition describes the seat as imitating yellow sandstone. His bare feet rest on a footstool. He is shown as an old man, with short white hair and a white beard, wearing a white tunic beneath a deep blue mantle; the 1884 description calls it “blauschwarz”, and it reads as a saturated blue in modern reproductions. His head is set against a gold nimbus with a red edge.

Matthew is shown in the act of writing. In his right hand he holds a pen, the calamus of the 1884 description, which he sets to a long scroll. The scroll lies across a lectern at the left, falls in a loose loop over his knees, and ends in a rolled end that he steadies with his left hand. The lectern stands on a slender green column with a turned, knotted shaft and a claw-like base. Writing on a scroll rather than in a codex is one of the many antique features of the image. It recalls the author portraits of Late Antiquity, from which the type of the seated, writing evangelist ultimately descends.

The evangelist does not look at his writing, nor up towards the source of his inspiration. He turns his head and gazes outward, to the right, with wide, steady eyes. The effect is one of grave attention, as though he were listening rather than composing. The figure is thus less a scribe at work than a witness through whom the Gospel passes.

That source of inspiration appears at the top of the page. In a small roundel set into the upper edge of the patterned field, a half-length figure with a nimbus looks down from heaven. This is Matthew’s symbol, the man (in later usage often called the angel), which the 1884 edition describes as peering down from the sky. The symbol is reduced to a modest scale and placed at the very margin of the image. It marks the divine origin of the text without competing with the monumental figure of the evangelist below.

The name is set across the field in large gold capitals on a dark band, divided by the nimbus: S(AN)C(T)US MA–THEUS (Sanctus Mattheus).

The most striking element of the page is its ground. The figure is set not against a landscape or architecture but against a field of purple densely covered with a gold geometric pattern of interlocking frets and crosses, like a precious textile. The 1884 edition describes this ground as “goldig gemustertes Purpur” and notes that the patterning changes from one evangelist portrait to the next. The page is enclosed by a frame of blue and gold bands.

The purple-and-gold ground deliberately echoes the dedication pages, in which the verses to Egbert and his portrait are likewise set on purple with gold ornament. It places the evangelists in the same register of imperial and sacred luxury as the archbishop’s own image. Against this flat, shimmering surface, the seated figure, modelled in blue and white and set on a seat drawn in perspective, appears to project forward. The contrast between the abstract ground and the solid, volumetric body is one of the most effective features of the design.

The question of authorship is more open here than in the narrative cycle. The evangelist portraits are not among the seven miniatures conventionally attributed to the Gregory Master, and the catalogue records assign them to no specific hand; the description issued with the 2005 facsimile, however, credits the Master with the portraits of the evangelists (see the section on attribution below). What can be said is that the portrait is the work of a painter of considerable accomplishment. The broad, simplified masses of the drapery, the careful modelling of the face, and the firm structure of the seat and footstool give the figure a gravity worthy of the opening of the book. The four portraits together serve as a frontispiece to the Gospel readings that follow, presenting the authors through whom the text of the lectionary was believed to have been transmitted.

The Listening Evangelist: The Portrait of Saint Mark in the Codex Egberti, fol. 4r

The portrait of Saint Mark on fol. 4r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) faces the portrait of Saint Matthew on fol. 3v. Together they form the first of the two double openings devoted to the evangelists. The two pages were clearly conceived as a pair. They share the same format, the same frame of blue and gold bands, the same block-like seat, footstool and turned lectern, and the same device of the name in gold capitals on a dark band, divided by the nimbus. Within this common scheme, however, the painter has introduced a series of deliberate variations, and it is through these that the portrait of Mark acquires its own character.

The first variation is the ground. Matthew sits before a purple field covered with a rectilinear pattern of gold frets. Mark sits before a red-purple field patterned with a lattice of intersecting circles, each enclosing a gold four-petalled flower. The 1884 edition already observed that the patterning of the purple grounds changes from one evangelist to the next. The effect is that of two different precious textiles hung behind the two authors, a variation that enriches the opening without disturbing its unity.

The second variation lies in the arrangement of the figure. Mark is seated on an orange block-shaped seat with a pale green cushion, his bare feet resting on a footstool. The lectern stands at the right, at the outer edge of the page, whereas on Matthew’s page it stands at the left. Its knotted, turned shaft rises from a clawed foot and carries a slanted desk. The two evangelists, each placed between his lectern and the inner margin of the book, are thus turned towards one another across the gutter. Matthew looks out to the right, Mark leans and looks to the left and upward, so that the opening reads as a single composition rather than two separate images.

The third and most significant variation concerns the action. Matthew writes. Mark does not. He holds an open codex in his lap with his right hand, while his left rests on his knee. He has stopped and lifts his head, gazing upwards with wide eyes and furrowed brow. The painter gives him the type of an old man, bald on the crown with a fringe of white hair and a full white beard, his head set against a gold nimbus with a red rim. He wears a white tunic and a red mantle, which the 1884 edition records, and the mantle falls in broad, softly modelled folds across his knees.

The expression of his face, intent and almost anxious, is one of the most striking in the codex. It is the face of a man listening rather than composing. The portrait of Mark thus shows a different moment from that of Matthew: not the writing down of the Gospel but the reception of inspiration. That the painter intended this contrast between the two pages is an interpretation, but it is strongly suggested by the deliberate opposition of the two poses within an otherwise identical scheme.

The source of that inspiration appears directly above. Over the evangelist’s head, set into the upper edge of the patterned field, is his symbol, the winged lion. Its head is surrounded by a nimbus, and it holds or presents a white scroll whose ends curl outward. The 1884 edition simply notes the “Emblem des geflügelten Löwen”. The position of the symbol, immediately above Mark’s upturned face, gives the image its vertical axis. The gaze of the evangelist rises towards the lion, and the scroll held by the symbol seems to stand for the text he is about to receive. As with Matthew, the symbol is small and confined to the margin of the composition, so that the monumental human figure remains the true subject of the page.

The name reads S(AN)C(T)US MAR–CUS, divided by the nimbus, in the same form as on Matthew’s page.

As with the other evangelist portraits, the question of authorship remains open. The four portraits are not among the miniatures conventionally attributed to the Gregory Master, and the catalogue records assign them to no specific hand. The quality of the painting is nevertheless high. The modelling of the head, with its sunken cheeks and heavy brows, the confident drawing of the hands, and the careful construction of the seat, footstool and lectern give the figure a convincing weight and presence. The warm palette of the page, red mantle, orange seat, red-purple ground and gold, contrasts with the cooler blue-and-white figure of Matthew on the facing page.

The Evangelist as Scribe: The Portrait of Saint Luke in the Codex Egberti, fol. 5v

The portrait of Saint Luke on fol. 5v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) opens the second pair of evangelist portraits. It faces the portrait of Saint John on fol. 6r, just as Matthew (fol. 3v) faces Mark (fol. 4r) in the first opening. The four portraits follow the dedication pages and precede the Gospel readings, presenting the authors through whom the text of the lectionary was believed to have been transmitted.

The portrait of Luke shares the common scheme of the series. There is a frame of blue and gold bands, as the 1884 edition records for all four portraits, a ground of rich colour patterned in gold, a block-like seat with a cushion and footstool, a turned lectern, and the evangelist’s name in gold capitals on a dark band, divided by the nimbus. As on the other pages, it is divided by the nimbus: S(AN)C(T)US LU–CAS. Within this scheme the painter again varies the details.

The ground is covered with a dense geometric pattern of gold frets and crosses, closer to the pattern behind Matthew than to the floral lattice behind Mark. The 1884 edition notes that the patterning of the grounds changes from portrait to portrait. The lectern stands at the left, at the outer edge of the page, and is red, as the 1884 edition specifies: “Pult hier nicht wie in III und IV weissgelb, sondern roth”, “the lectern here is not white-yellow as in plates III and IV, but red”. Its turned, knotted shaft ends in clawed feet. Over its slanted top hangs a long white scroll whose end curls at the bottom.

Luke sits on a block-like seat with a red cushion, his bare feet on a footstool. Like the other evangelists in the codex, he is shown as an old man, with short white hair and a white beard. He wears a white tunic and a mantle of yellowish grey, the “gelbgrau” of the 1884 description, which falls in broad folds over his knees. His head is set against a gold nimbus with a red border.

He is in the act of writing. In his right hand he holds a pen and in his left he holds a sheet or scroll across his knee. Like Matthew, he writes on a roll rather than in a codex, a reminder of the Late Antique author portrait from which the type descends. His gaze, however, is directed outward, towards the viewer and slightly to the side, with an expression of grave attention, as if he were listening rather than composing.

At the top of the page, set into the upper edge of the patterned field, appears Luke’s symbol, the ox. Its head is turned downward and it holds a white scroll with curled ends. Like the lion of Mark, the symbol presents a written text, which may be read as the revelation that the evangelist receives and transcribes. The symbol is small and placed at the margin, so that the human figure of the evangelist remains the true subject of the page.

Seen in the series, the portrait of Luke confirms a pattern in the arrangement of the evangelist pages. Matthew on fol. 3v and Luke on fol. 5v, both on versos, are shown writing on scrolls, with the lectern at their left. Mark on fol. 4r, on a recto, holds an open codex in his lap and looks up towards his symbol, with the lectern at his right. John on fol. 6r, on a recto, follows Mark in the position of the lectern, at his right, but like Matthew and Luke he writes. The lectern therefore follows the side of the page, always at the outer edge, while the action varies: three of the four evangelists write, and only Mark pauses to listen.

As with the other evangelist portraits, the authorship of the page is not settled. The four portraits are not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master, and the catalogue records assign them to no specific hand. The painter’s skill is evident in the modelling of the head, the confident drawing of the hands, the construction of the seat and lectern in shallow perspective, and the play of the warm red and gold ground against the cool white and grey of the figure.

“In the Beginning Was the Word”: The Portrait of Saint John in the Codex Egberti, fol. 6r

The portrait of Saint John on fol. 6r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) closes the series of four evangelist portraits that follows the dedication pages. It faces the portrait of Saint Luke on fol. 5v, completing the second of the two openings that present the evangelists in pairs. The 1884 plate edition describes it briefly: ground, border, seat and lectern as in the portraits of Matthew and Mark, the evangelist shown as an old man, and his emblem, the eagle, above.

The portrait follows the common scheme of the series: a frame of blue and gold bands, a ground patterned in gold, a block-like seat with a cushion and footstool, a turned lectern with clawed feet, and the name in gold capitals on a dark band, divided by the nimbus. The inscription reads S(AN)C(T)US IOHAN–NES.

The ground is again different from those of the other evangelists, in accordance with the 1884 observation that the patterning changes from page to page. Here it is composed of cross-shaped motifs set with dots, alternating with gold four-petalled flowers. As on the other three pages, the lectern stands at the outer edge of the page. On the rectos, Mark’s page and John’s, it stands at the right. On the versos, those of Matthew and Luke, it stands at the left. In each opening, therefore, the two evangelists sit between their lecterns and the gutter of the book and face one another across it.

John sits on an orange seat with a green cushion, his bare feet on a footstool. He is shown as an old man, with short white hair and a white beard, as the 1884 edition notes. He wears a white tunic and a dark purple-brown mantle that falls in broad folds over his knees. His head is set against a gold nimbus with a red border.

He is writing. Across his lap lies a large orange writing board on which a sheet or scroll is spread. He holds a pen in his right hand and steadies the board with his left. At the right stands the lectern, with a turned, knotted shaft, clawed feet and a slanted top. Like the other evangelists, John does not look at his writing. He gazes straight out of the picture with wide eyes and a grave, almost anxious expression. This is the posture of the inspired author who receives what he writes rather than composing it by his own effort.

Above him, set into the upper edge of the patterned field, appears his symbol, the eagle. It is small, nimbed, and holds a scroll that unrolls downward towards the evangelist’s head. As with the lion of Mark and the ox of Luke, the symbol presents a written text. The eagle, traditionally associated with John because of the soaring theological vision of the prologue of his Gospel, is placed directly above the evangelist’s head, giving the composition its vertical axis.

Seen as a series, the four portraits show how a single scheme could be varied without losing its unity. The frame, the seat, the lectern, the name band and the symbol remain constant. The ground pattern, the colours of the garments, the position of the lectern and the action of the evangelist vary. Matthew, Luke and John write on scrolls; Mark holds an open codex and lifts his gaze. All four are old men with white hair and beards. All four look out of the picture rather than at their work.

As with the other evangelist portraits, the authorship of the page is not settled. The four portraits are not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master, and the catalogue records assign them to no specific hand. The quality of the modelling, in the face with its furrowed brow and wide eyes, in the hands, and in the heavy folds of the mantle, places the page among the most accomplished of the codex.

The Miniature Cycle and Its Models

The heart of the Codex Egberti is its cycle of fifty-one narrative miniatures, and it is here that the manuscript’s importance in the history of art principally rests. The cycle follows the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Virgin through to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles at Pentecost, distributed through the manuscript so that each image stands with the pericope it illustrates, according to the sequence of the liturgical year rather than a continuous biographical narrative. Earlier Gospel books and lectionaries had carried author portraits, canon tables, decorated incipits, and the occasional isolated scene; the Codex Egberti offers instead a sustained visual life of Christ, and in doing so it stands at the head of a tradition that Ottonian and then Romanesque art would develop for centuries.

The range of scenes is unusually wide. Alongside the expected feasts — the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Baptism, the Entry into Jerusalem, the Passion, the Resurrection appearances, the Ascension, and Pentecost — the cycle includes a generous selection of the miracles and healings: the miracle at Cana, the healing of the paralytic, the healing at the pool of Bethesda, Christ walking on the water, the healing of the blind man, the raising of Lazarus, the miraculous draught of fishes, the healing of the centurion’s servant at Capernaum, the raising of the daughter of Jairus, and the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, among others. A number of these scenes are rare or without close parallel in surviving contemporary books, which is one of the reasons the cycle is so valued: it preserves iconographic solutions that either had no wide currency or whose other witnesses have been lost.

The scenes are captioned. Figures are frequently identified by inscriptions in gold Uncial, and in at least one celebrated instance the pictorial narrative is elaborated with explanatory tituli. On folio 80v the events following the arrest of Christ are set out in three superimposed registers, with the individual episodes explained by inscriptions written in gold on purple ribbons that thread through the composition. This register format — a stacking of successive moments within a single framed field, guided by text — is itself a device of ancient narrative art, and its appearance here is part of what has led scholars to look behind the Codex Egberti to older models.

The question of those models is one of the most discussed aspects of the manuscript, and it must be handled carefully, because it is a domain in which a plausible hypothesis has sometimes hardened, in the secondary literature, into an asserted fact. What can be said securely is that the cycle synthesises a range of pictorial traditions: Late Antique and Early Christian narrative art, Carolingian precedent, and Byzantine iconography, the last very plausibly transmitted through Italian intermediaries of the kind Egbert’s circle could have encountered on the Italian journeys of 980 and 983. The stylistic and iconographic evidence for this synthesis is real: the graded atmospheric grounds, the register compositions, the square nimbus of the donor portrait, the poses and gestures of certain figures, and the general classicism of the enterprise all point toward a deep engagement with older Mediterranean art.

What is more speculative is the further claim, often encountered, that the cycle copies a single, specific, now-lost Late Antique picture book, a fully illustrated Gospel or Gospel harmony of the fifth or sixth century, which the Ottonian artists reproduced. This is a hypothesis of long standing and real interest, and it would neatly account for the coherence and the archaism of the cycle. But it is a hypothesis, not a demonstrated fact. The evidence is consistent with the use of one or more older models, and equally consistent with a more creative process in which the artists assembled and adapted motifs from several sources, some pictorial and some textual, under the direction of a designer of exceptional learning.

The UNESCO nomination form itself frames the matter in terms of models in the plural — “paintings from Late Antiquity, the Carolingian period and Byzantium” — and stresses that “their intention was not imitation, but creative new design.” The prudent conclusion is that the cycle rests on a substantial inheritance of older narrative art, transmitted in significant part through Italy, but that the existence and reconstruction of a single lost archetype remain matters of scholarly argument rather than settled knowledge.

Whatever its sources, the cycle is a work of genuine theological design and not a mere anthology of scenes. The selection and sequence of images track the readings of the Mass and thereby the unfolding of salvation history through the church’s year; the pictures function as exegesis, drawing out the meaning of the pericopes they accompany and binding the seen image to the heard and read word. It is this integration of picture, text, and liturgy — the image as a mode of “spiritual seeing,” to use a phrase that modern scholarship has applied to the manuscript’s Pentecost — that makes the Codex Egberti not simply the earliest extensive Christ cycle in a Western book but one of the most intellectually ambitious.

“Liber Evangeliorum per Circulum Anni”: The Original Title Page of the Codex Egberti, fol. 7v

Fol. 7v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) carries the original title of the book. It is one of the purple pages with which the codex opens, following the dedication and the four evangelist portraits. The codicological description prepared for the 2005 facsimile counts it among the two framed incipit pages of gold lettering on purple grounds that introduce the readings. The 1884 plate edition describes it as a purple ground with a gold border containing palmette-like ornament.

The colour reproduction makes the full arrangement of the page visible. The whole leaf is stained purple, with a mottled, velvety surface, and is enclosed by an outer edge of gold and red. Within this purple field a second frame of gold sets off the text area. It is formed by a band of leaves arranged in a running garland, the “palmettenartiges Ornament” of 1884, between thin red and gold lines. Inside the garland the text is written in gold capitals on the same purple ground. The double framing, an outer purple margin and an inner gold garland, gives the title the appearance of an inscribed panel set into a precious textile.

The text, as it can be read on the page and as the 1884 edition transcribed it, runs:

IN NOMINE D(OMI)NI INCIPIT LIBER EVANGELIOR(UM) PER CIRCULUM ANNI SUMPTU(S) EX LIBRO COMITIS. IN VIGILIA NATALIS D(OMI)NI STATITIO [sic, for statio] AD S(ANCTAM) MARIAM HORA VIIII. SEQUENTIA S(AN)C(T)I EV(ANGELII) SEC(UNDUM) MATHEUM.

That is: “In the name of the Lord begins the book of the Gospels for the cycle of the year, taken from the book of the Comes. On the vigil of the Nativity of the Lord, the station at Saint Mary’s, at the ninth hour. The continuation of the holy Gospel according to Matthew.”

The lettering is arranged in lines of different sizes. Large display capitals set off three moments of the text: the invocation In nomine, the source ex libro co[mitis], and the opening of the reading, Sequentia. Between them, smaller capitals carry the rest. A larger initial I marks In vigilia, the beginning of the liturgical rubric. The alternation gives the page a clear visual hierarchy. It distinguishes the title of the book from the first rubric and from the formula that introduces the Gospel text. The gold is applied thickly, and the letters stand out with a metallic sheen against the deep purple.

The text itself is a compact statement of what the book is. It calls itself a liber evangeliorum per circulum anni, a book of the Gospel readings for the course of the liturgical year. It declares that its readings are “taken from the book of the Comes”, the official list of the pericopes for the Mass, whose origins reach back to the Roman liturgy of Late Antiquity and which was revised several times in the Carolingian period. The 1884 edition, following the study of the text published three years earlier, observes that the recension used in the Codex Egberti does not coincide exactly with any of the printed versions of the Comes.

The second part of the title gives the first reading of the book: the vigil of Christmas, with its station ad sanctam Mariam, at the ninth hour. The formula transfers into a book made for Trier the topography and timetable of the papal liturgy of Rome, where the Christmas vigil Mass was celebrated at Santa Maria Maggiore at the hour of None. The word statio is miswritten as STATITIO, an error already noted in 1884 and clearly visible on the page.

The title is also a key document for the history of the manuscript. It shows that the book was planned to begin with the vigil of Christmas, as Roman Comites commonly did. In the codex as it now stands, however, the title page is followed by an Advent section: the decorated initial of fol. 8r (Cum appropinquasset Hierosolymis, the older Gospel of the first Sunday of Advent), the Annunciation (fol. 9v) and the Visitation (fol. 10v). The Christmas vigil reading promised by the title appears only on fol. 12r, introduced by the Dream of Joseph and by the same rubric, In vigilia natalis Domini. Secundum Mattheum. The nineteenth-century analysis of the gatherings, adopted in the 1884 edition, concluded that the title page and fol. 12r originally belonged together. The Advent section would have been inserted afterwards so that the picture cycle could begin with the Annunciation and the Visitation. The title page thus now precedes an Advent sequence that its own text does not announce.

As a piece of decoration, the page belongs to the tradition of purple leaves with gold or silver script that the Carolingian court schools revived from the luxury books of Late Antiquity. With the purple dedication pages (fols. 1v–2r) and the purple grounds of the evangelist portraits (fols. 3v–6r), it completes the sequence of frontispieces in which the codex displays, before the first Gospel reading, the dignity of its patron, its authors and its liturgical purpose.

“Cum Appropinquassent Hierosolymis”: The Great Initial of the Codex Egberti, fol. 8r

Fol. 8r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) is the first page of Gospel text in the manuscript. It is devoted almost entirely to a single great initial. It faces the original title page on fol. 7v, and the two purple leaves together form a double opening at the threshold of the readings. The codicological description prepared for the 2005 facsimile counts them as the two framed incipit pages of gold lettering on purple grounds, and describes the opening word, cum, as a monogram embellished with gold and silver interlace and leafy vines. The 1884 plate edition describes the page as a purple ground with gold and vermilion, with black and gold floral garlands in the border.

The page is framed by a broad border in which dark leaves and gold and silver strokes alternate in a running garland. This is the “schwarzgoldne Blumengewinde” of the 1884 description. Within it the purple field, velvety and slightly mottled, carries the text in gold capitals. At the top stands GLORIA TIBI D(OMI)NE. At the bottom, in two lines,

APPROPINQUAS–SENT HIEROSOLYMIS.

Between them the initial fills almost the whole of the field.

The text gives the opening of Matthew 21:1,

Cum appropinquassent Hierosolymis, “And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem”.

The 1884 edition identifies this as the older Gospel of the first Sunday of Advent, the reading of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with which the season began in the earlier Roman tradition. The acclamation above, Gloria tibi, Domine, is the response with which the congregation greeted the announcement of the Gospel at Mass. Written into the page, it makes the book record the liturgical exchange that surrounded the reading.

The initial is a monogram of the whole word cum. A great C, its bow edged in gold, encloses a field of silver. Across this silver ground the letters U and M, drawn in gold, are woven into a dense web of interlaced bands and scrolling stems. The stems are coloured in vermilion and gold and end in small trefoil leaves and buds. At the left a knot of gold interlace, worked in tightly plaited strands, projects from the bow of the C across the frame into the inner margin of the page, as if fastening the letter to the binding. The colour scheme is restrained but rich: the purple of the ground, the gold of the letters and frame, the silver of the letter’s interior and the vermilion of the scrolls. The silver has darkened in places, as is common with silver in medieval manuscripts, and the gold retains its sheen.

The 1884 edition characterises the initial as “in the style of Scoto-Irish interlace”. It observes that this initial and the one on fol. 16v, at the beginning of the Epiphany reading, show a step towards a more naturalistic treatment of plant ornament compared with the tenth-century ornament of St Gall, while still preserving echoes of the interlace that Insular book art had made popular on the Continent. The colour reproduction bears out both observations. The plaited knot at the left belongs to the interlace tradition. The scrolling stems with trefoil terminals inside the letter belong to the foliate ornament that the Ottonian painters developed from Carolingian models.

The page also holds a particular place in the history of the manuscript. According to the nineteenth-century analysis of the gatherings adopted in the 1884 edition, the book was originally planned to begin with the vigil of Christmas, as the title on fol. 7v announces. The Advent readings were added afterwards before the Christmas section, so that the picture cycle could open with the Annunciation and the Visitation. Fol. 8r is the first page of that inserted Advent section. If this reconstruction is correct, the opening of fols. 7v–8r makes the change of plan visible. On the left the title announces the vigil of Christmas. On the right the great initial opens the Gospel of the first Sunday of Advent.

The initial is the most elaborate in the codex. The 1884 edition notes that significant decorated initials are rare in the manuscript and reproduces only two of them, this one and the initial of the Epiphany reading on fol. 16v. Together they mark two key points of the liturgical year at the beginning of the codex: the start of Advent and the feast of the Epiphany.

“The Angel Gabriel Was Sent”: The Annunciation in the Codex Egberti, fol. 9v

The Annunciation on fol. 9v is the first narrative miniature of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It thus opens the earliest surviving extensive cycle of the life of Christ in a Western book. It is also the first of the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master, as recorded in the photographic catalogue of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. With the Visitation that follows on fol. 10v, it forms the threshold of the whole pictorial programme.

The presence of this image in the book has a remarkable codicological history. The text of the Codex Egberti was copied from an exemplar of the Roman Comes whose readings began with the vigil of Christmas and placed the Advent readings at the end of the year. The nineteenth-century study of the gatherings, adopted in the 1884 plate edition, observed that the Advent section now standing before Christmas was inserted into the book after the text had been planned: the leaves on either side of it originally belonged together. The Advent readings also appear a second time in their old position at the end of the manuscript (fols. 147–151).

The explanation proposed was that the painter’s picture cycle began with the Annunciation and the Visitation. To include these scenes in their narrative place, before the Nativity, the Advent readings that they illustrate had to be moved forward. If this reconstruction is correct, the Annunciation and Visitation reshaped the very structure of the manuscript. It would also imply that the picture cycle followed a model independent of the text exemplar. This analysis dates from the nineteenth century and rests on the structure of the gatherings.

The page itself bears out the Advent setting. The three lines of text above the miniature close a pericope with the words

Hic est enim de quo scriptum est: Ecce mitto angelum meum ante faciem tuam, qui praeparabit viam tuam ante te.

The phrase hic est enim identifies the passage as Matthew 11:9–10 rather than its Lucan parallel. In the Roman lectionary this passage concludes the Gospel of the second Sunday of Advent. The reading the miniature introduces, Luke 1:26–38 (Missus est angelus Gabriel), belongs in the same tradition to the Wednesday of the Advent Ember days, and the Visitation to the following Friday. The sequence is consistent with that setting.

The visual consequence is striking. Christ’s words about the messenger sent before his face, ecce mitto angelum meum, stand directly above the image of the angel sent to Mary. The juxtaposition arises from the order of the readings, not necessarily from the painter’s design, but for a reader of the open book the two “messengers” inevitably answer one another.

The composition is of exemplary clarity. Two gold inscriptions name the subject and the place: ADNUNTIATIO above the angel at the left, NAZARETH above the city at the right. The figures stand on a strip of uneven yellowish ground rising in low hillocks, beneath a sky of bright blue; the 1884 edition calls it “himmelblau”.

At the left, Gabriel strides forward barefoot. He is a tall figure with large wings in shades of green, a gold nimbus, a lilac tunic and a pale green mantle. In his left hand he holds a long staff topped with a cross, the 1884 description’s “Kreuz in der Linken”. He raises his right hand with two fingers extended in the gesture of speech.

Opposite him stands Mary, also nimbed in gold. She wears a white veil, a red-brown mantle drawn over her shoulders, and a long white gown. She does not sit, read or spin; she stands, as the Hertziana record notes (“Maria steht”). She has just stepped out of the city behind her, as the 1884 edition already observed. Her right hand is raised with the palm turned outward, and her left is extended, open, towards the angel. The double gesture can be read as the startled response of the Gospel, in which Mary is “troubled at his saying” and asks “How shall this be?” (Luke 1:29, 34). It holds her at the moment between hearing and consent.

Nazareth is rendered as a walled city in the manner of Late Antique and Early Christian art. Its masonry walls are crenellated and strengthened with towers, and behind them rise buildings with red roofs and a pedimented gateway, whose dark red door seems to open directly behind the Virgin. The 1884 edition describes the walls as white, reddish and violet and the roofs as red. The city is a compact architectural formula comparable to the Bethlehem of the Master’s Massacre of the Innocents on fol. 15v.

The qualities associated with the Gregory Master are fully in evidence. The figures are few, large and calm. Between them lies a wide interval of empty ground across which the angel’s word passes: the same device that structures the Master’s Centurion on fol. 22r. The drapery is broad and softly modelled, the angel’s mantle swinging in a long diagonal curve across his body. The palette, the clear blue of the sky, the green of the wings, the lilac, red and white of the garments, has a luminous freshness that the facsimile literature singles out as characteristic of the cycle.

Technical study of the codex has reported that among its painters only the Gregory Master used the blue pigment azurite. No pigment analysis specific to this folio is reported, so any connection with the intense blue of the sky here remains a hypothesis. What is certain is that the opening image of the cycle was entrusted to its most accomplished painter. It sets, with a restraint that verges on solemnity, the tone for the narrative that follows.

“Into a City of Juda”: The Visitation in the Codex Egberti, fol. 10v

The Visitation on fol. 10v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) is the second narrative miniature of the cycle. It is attributed, like the Annunciation on fol. 9v, to the Gregory Master, according to the photographic catalogue of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. The two images belong to the Advent section that, according to the nineteenth-century study of the gatherings, was inserted before the Christmas readings so that the picture cycle could begin with these two Marian scenes.

The page itself confirms their liturgical setting. The line above the miniature closes the preceding reading with the last words of the Annunciation, fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (Luke 1:38). It then gives the rubric FERIA VI in gold capitals. Below the miniature, red Rustic Capitals announce

Sequentia sancti evangelii secundum Lucam,

and a large gold initial I opens the new pericope at the left margin. This is the reading of Luke 1:39 and following,

Exsurgens autem Maria abiit in montana cum festinatione in civitatem Iuda,

appointed in the Roman tradition for the Friday of the Advent Ember days. The Annunciation and the Visitation are thus the Gospels of two successive Ember days, the Wednesday and the Friday. The miniatures follow the rhythm of that penitential week.

The composition is one of the simplest and most moving in the codex. At the left, on a broad expanse of golden-ochre ground, Mary and Elisabeth meet and embrace. They stand pressed together, cheek against cheek, each with her arms around the other, so that their two bodies merge into a single silhouette beneath two overlapping gold nimbi. Both wear white veils that frame their faces. According to the 1884 edition, the Virgin is the figure at the left, in a violet mantle over a white gown, and Elisabeth the figure at the right, in a green mantle. Elisabeth also wears a white shawl striped with gold that falls over her shoulder and down her side. No other figures are present: neither Joseph nor Zacharias, who appear in some later versions of the scene. The encounter is reduced to the two women and their greeting.

At the right, on a high green hill whose slopes rise in rounded bands, stands a walled city. It has crenellated towers, an arched gate, an arcaded upper storey, and a gabled roof crowned with a crossed finial and covered in red tiles. The 1884 edition gives the walls as blue-violet and the roof as red, and identifies the city as the civitas Iuda of Luke 1:39. The hill and the city together give visual form to the opening words of the pericope written immediately below the image: Mary went “into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda”. The painter places them at the far side of the picture, as the goal of Mary’s journey, while the meeting itself takes place on the open ground before it.

The sky follows the graded scheme characteristic of the cycle, in which bands of colour replace a naturalistic setting. A band of turquoise blue along the upper edge gives way to a broad zone of violet-rose, which in turn passes into the golden ochre of the ground. The 1884 edition describes it as “red, with green-blue tones above”. Against this soft, luminous field, the embracing figures stand out with great clarity.

The wide empty interval between the two women and the city is a deliberate compositional choice. It occupies almost half the width of the picture and isolates the embrace as the single focus of the scene. The same use of interval appears in the Annunciation and in the Centurion on fol. 22r, also attributed to the Gregory Master.

The embrace of the two women belongs to an old type of the Visitation, in which the greeting is shown as a close bodily encounter rather than an exchange of gestures across space. Here it is handled with a restraint and intimacy that are characteristic of the Gregory Master. The bodies are drawn as tall, closed forms, their outlines continuous. The faces nearly touch, and the hands, Mary’s resting on Elisabeth’s back and Elisabeth’s clasping Mary’s waist, are rendered with economy and tenderness. The drapery falls in long vertical folds that emphasise the stillness of the moment. Nothing in the image suggests narrative movement. The haste of Mary’s journey, cum festinatione, is left to the text, while the image holds the moment of arrival and recognition, the meeting in which, according to the Gospel, the child leapt in Elisabeth’s womb.

The miniature has suffered some losses. Flaking of the paint is visible in the gold nimbi, in Elisabeth’s green mantle and along the hills, and a vertical crack runs through the upper part of the sky. These damages do not affect the legibility of the composition. They are worth noting in any close description of the page.

“Joseph, Son of David, Fear Not”: The Dream of Joseph in the Codex Egberti, fol. 12r

The Dream of Joseph on fol. 12r is the third narrative miniature of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is attributed, like the Annunciation and the Visitation before it, to the Gregory Master in the photographic catalogue of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. Its position in the manuscript is of particular significance, because this is the page at which the book returns to its original order.

Above the miniature a line closes the preceding reading with the words

trans Iordanem, ubi erat Iohannes baptizans (John 1:28),

the end of the Gospel of the fourth Sunday of Advent in the Roman tradition. Below the miniature, in red Rustic Capitals, stands the rubric

In vigilia natalis Domini. Secundum Mattheum,

and a large gold initial I opens the new reading at the left margin. This is the Gospel of the Christmas vigil, Matthew 1:18 and following:

Cum esset desponsata mater Iesu Maria Ioseph…

The rubric echoes the original title page of the book on fol. 7v. That page announces a liber evangeliorum per circulum anni sumptus ex libro Comitis, a book of Gospels for the year taken from the Comes, which begins precisely in vigilia natalis Domini, with the station at Saint Mary’s. The nineteenth-century study of the gatherings, adopted in the 1884 plate edition, observed that the title page and this leaf belonged together. The Advent section between them, with the Annunciation and the Visitation, was inserted afterwards. If that reconstruction is right, the Dream of Joseph would have been the image that opened the narrative cycle before the two Marian scenes were placed in front of it.

The miniature illustrates the first of Joseph’s dreams. Troubled by Mary’s pregnancy and minded to put her away privately, Joseph is visited in sleep by an angel who says to him: “Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 1:20). The painter shows the sleeper and the messenger and nothing more.

Joseph lies on a bed with a gilded wooden frame, turned corner posts and a sagging, boat-like body. He rests on a green mattress or cover banded with gold, his head propped on a red pillow at the right. He is bearded, with dark curly hair, and wears a violet tunic, as the 1884 edition records, which falls in heavy folds over his legs and hangs over the side of the bed. His eyes are closed and his head inclines towards his shoulder, in a pose of deep, unguarded sleep that recalls the reclining figures of Late Antique art.

Above him, at the upper left, the angel appears in half-length, as if emerging from the sky on a small cloud. He has blue-grey wings and a gold nimbus, and wears a blue-grey tunic and a white mantle, again as the 1884 description gives it. He holds a long cross-topped staff, the same attribute carried by Gabriel in the Annunciation, and stretches his open right hand towards the sleeper. Between the angel’s hand and Joseph’s head stands the inscription IOSEPH. It identifies the sleeper, but it also seems to hang in the air as the first word of the angel’s message, the vocative with which the Gospel’s address begins. Whether this double reading was intended cannot be proved, but the placement of the label in the very path of the angel’s gesture makes it difficult to ignore.

The setting is reduced to the essentials. At the right a building with a pedimented portico, an arched opening, a wall of ashlar masonry and a red tiled roof crowned with a crossed finial suggests Joseph’s house. The 1884 edition notes its white walls and red roof. A rocky outcrop closes the scene at the lower right. The rest of the field is filled with the graded ground characteristic of the cycle: a blue-green sky (the 1884 description says “Hintergrund und Bett grün”) over a pale, rose-beige ground.

The composition plays on a strong diagonal. The angel’s outstretched arm and the long axis of his staff lead the eye down towards the bed. The bed in turn rises from left to right towards the sleeper’s head and the house behind it. The open space between angel and sleeper, the interval across which the message passes, is the same device that structures the Annunciation and other pages attributed to the Gregory Master.

The page shows the Master’s gift for compositions of few figures and great clarity. The modelling of the sleeping Joseph, with the weight of his body sinking into the mattress and the heavy fall of his tunic, conveys sleep with physical conviction. The angel, by contrast, is light and airborne, his half-figure rising out of the colour of the sky. The palette is restrained and harmonious: the violet of Joseph’s tunic and the green of the bed set against the cool blue-green of the sky, warmed by the gold of the bed frame, the nimbus and the staff. There is some damage to the painted surface, notably a scratch or crack across the roof of the building at the upper right and small losses in the sky.

“In the Same Country Shepherds Abiding”: The Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds in the Codex Egberti, fol. 13r

The Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds on fol. 13r is the fourth miniature attributed to the Gregory Master in the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is also the only one in the opening sequence that occupies a full page. The photographic catalogue of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg accordingly records it as a Bildseite, a picture page, rather than a miniature set into the text. The change of format is itself a statement. After the framed scenes of the Annunciation, the Visitation and the Dream of Joseph, the birth of Christ is given the whole page, divided into two superimposed registers that unfold the narrative of Luke 2 from the manger to the fields of Bethlehem.

The upper register bears the gold inscription

NATIVITAS D(OMI)NI.

The scene is set inside Bethlehem, which the painter represents, in the manner of Late Antique and Early Christian art, as a walled castellum. This is the 1884 edition’s description: a curving circuit of crenellated ashlar walls with arcades, ending at the right in a round tower. Within it stands a building with a pedimented front and a long roof of rose-red tiles. Through three window openings in its upper wall, the ox and the ass look down on the manger. They are not mentioned in the Gospel, but they were present in the iconography of the Nativity from its earliest examples, in keeping with Isaiah 1:3.

The manger itself is the most striking element of the scene. It is not a trough but a solid, box-like structure of warm red-orange, its front opened by a row of round arches. It resembles an altar or an arcaded sarcophagus far more than a feeding crib. The Child lies on it swaddled in white, with a gold nimbus. The association of the manger with the altar is an old exegetical theme. That the painter intended it here is a reading, not a documented fact, but the arcaded form gives the image a clear eucharistic resonance.

Mary, nimbed in gold and veiled in white, bends over the manger from the left and holds the swaddled Child with both hands. Her green mantle is recorded in the 1884 edition and is now heavily damaged by flaking. She is not shown reclining on a mattress, as in the Byzantine type of the Nativity, but standing or kneeling at the manger’s side in a gesture of tender attention. Joseph stands at the right, also nimbed, with curly hair and beard. He wears a white tunic and a violet pallium, again as recorded in 1884, and goes barefoot, his right hand resting on the edge of the manger. Two small inscriptions at the upper left and right, near the figures, appear to name Mary and Joseph. They are too faded to be read with confidence.

The lower register is set against a blue-green sky over a strip of golden ground. The 1884 edition describes it as “seegrün” (sea-green). Here the painter illustrates the Annunciation to the Shepherds, but in a form that follows the Gospel with unusual fidelity. Rather than the single angel of Luke 2:9, he shows the “multitude of the heavenly host” of Luke 2:13. About ten angels, winged and nimbed, are crowded together in half-length on a cloud. Several raise their hands, and the foremost stretches out his arm towards the earth. A partly preserved gold inscription, transcribed in 1884 as AN…GELI, identifies them.

Below at the left stand three shepherds, bearded and curly-haired, in short tunics, cloaks and banded leggings, leaning on their staffs. They look up towards the angels. One raises a hand to his chin in a gesture of wonder, the others lift their open palms. Before them their flock, sheep and horned rams, grazes on the ground.

At the right rises a tall tower of two storeys with arched windows and red roofs, inscribed TURRIS GREGIS, the “tower of the flock”. The inscription is a precise topographical reference. The turris gregis (Migdal Eder) of Genesis 35:21 and Micah 4:8 was identified by Jerome⁶ as a place near Bethlehem associated with the shepherds of the Nativity. In his account of Paula’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Epistle 108), he describes her visit to the turris Ader, id est gregis. The 1884 edition already noted that the tower is to be understood as the shepherds’ fold. Its presence here shows that the image was informed not only by the Gospel text but also by the patristic and topographical tradition of the holy places.

The two registers are bound together by more than their shared subject. In the upper scene the eye is drawn to the manger at the centre of a closed, walled space. In the lower scene the movement opens outward and upward, from the shepherds and their flock to the angels in the sky. The outstretched arm of the foremost angel points across the dividing line towards the Nativity above, so that the announcement and its object are visually connected across the page. The shepherds’ journey to Bethlehem, which follows in the Gospel (Luke 2:15–16), is left implicit, suggested by the vertical relationship between the two scenes.

The page displays the qualities that define the Gregory Master. The figures are carefully proportioned and solidly modelled; the shepherds in particular are among the most robust and vivid in the codex. The architecture is constructed with an unusual sense of volume. The composition is clear despite the density of its contents. The page has, however, suffered considerably. There are extensive losses in Mary’s green mantle, in the front of the manger, and above all in the blue-green sky of the lower register, where large areas of paint have flaked away. Two long scratches or cracks run across the upper part of the page. These losses do not affect the legibility of the scenes, but they are an important part of the page’s present condition.

“Rachel Weeping for Her Children”: The Massacre of the Innocents in the Codex Egberti, fol. 15v

The Massacre of the Innocents occupies fol. 15v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is one of the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and the last of the opening group of five in which his hand is recognised: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Dream of Joseph, the Nativity, and this scene.

Its position reveals the liturgical logic of the book. The text it illustrates, Matthew 2:16–18, is read on the feast of the Holy Innocents on 28 December, within the Christmas octave. The miniature therefore follows the Nativity on fol. 13r and precedes the decorated initial of Matthew 2:1 on fol. 16v and the Adoration of the Magi on fol. 17r. The book thus shows the murder of the children before the visit of the Magi that, in the Gospel narrative, causes it: the order of images follows the calendar of feasts, not the sequence of the story, a reminder that the Codex Egberti is a liturgical book before it is a picture Bible.

Three gold inscriptions organise the scene: HERODIS (transcribed in 1884 as HERODES) over the king at the left, PUERI OCCIDUNTUR (“the boys are slain”) in the centre, and BETHLEEM over the city at the right. They correspond to three zones of the composition, which read from left to right as a chain of cause and effect: the command, the execution, and the lament.

At the left stands Herod, crowned and bearded. He wears a purple tunic edged with gold bands, a red cloak, and blue hose, and he extends his right index finger towards the slaughter he has ordered. Behind him rise the heads and spears of his guards. Herod is shown standing and issuing his order in person, rather than enthroned, as he appears, for instance, in the fifth-century mosaic of the triumphal arch of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. His gesture is the visual origin of everything that follows. The calm, upright figure, the only one in the scene untouched by movement, gives the act of murder the cold character of an official decree.

The centre is given over to violence. Three executioners in short tunics of blue, ochre and rose advance from the king’s side. One raises a sword overhead, another lifts a second sword, and the third, crouching in the foreground, drives a long lance into the body of a child. Above them a naked infant is seized and held aloft. Below, the dead children lie heaped one upon another in a pyramid of bodies at the centre of the picture, their limbs entangled. The painter does not linger on wounds, though blood appears at the point of the lance. The horror lies in the pile itself, which fills the space between murderers and mothers and becomes the axis of the whole composition. The 1884 edition remarks on the strong, warm flesh colour of the naked bodies, which stand out sharply against the cool, grey-violet sky.

At the right, beneath the towered walls of Bethlehem, the mothers lament. One, veiled in white, leans forward and stretches both hands towards a child, as if to receive it or plead for it. Another, her long hair loose and her upper body bared, throws up her arms in a cry. A third kneels in the foreground, hair unbound and breast bared, pressing her hands to her chest. A fourth, veiled in purple, covers her face with her hands. These gestures, loosened hair, bared breasts, raised arms and the hidden face, belong to the ancient repertory of mourning that Early Christian and Byzantine art inherited from Antiquity. Here they give visual form to the prophecy that Matthew quotes at the close of the pericope: “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Rachel plorans filios suos, et noluit consolari, quia non sunt, Matthew 2:18, after Jeremiah 31:15). The mothers are, in effect, the many figures of the one Rachel.

The city behind them is rendered in the manner of Late Antique and Early Christian art, as a compact cluster of towers, battlements and red roofs with an arched gate. It stands at the edge of the picture as the sign of place rather than as a real setting. Beneath the mothers a rocky outcrop closes the composition at the lower right.

The miniature shows clearly why the Gregory Master is regarded as the leading painter of his generation. The composition is crowded and filled with movement, yet it is never confused. The three zones are distinct, the diagonal thrust of the executioners’ weapons leads the eye towards the heap of bodies, and the vertical figure of Herod at the left is answered by the vertical towers of Bethlehem at the right. The figures have the solid, rounded bodies and weighty presence characteristic of his hand, and their faces, especially those of the mothers, are drawn with an unusual intensity of expression. The palette is restrained but rich: the purple and red of Herod, the blue, ochre and rose of the executioners, and the red, green and purple of the mothers are set against a sky that shades from violet to pale grey above a strip of green ground.

The contrast between the impassive authority of the king and the anguish of the mothers is the true subject of the image. The painter achieves it not through narrative detail but through the deliberate orchestration of stillness and movement across the width of the page.

Following the Star: The Journey and Adoration of the Magi in the Codex Egberti, fol. 17r

The miniature of the Journey and Adoration of the Magi occupies fol. 17r of the Codex Egberti, the Gospel lectionary made for Archbishop Egbert of Trier and now Hs. 24 of the Stadtbibliothek. The folio is documented consistently in the photographic catalogues: the Bibliotheca Hertziana record lists the miniature as “Zug und Anbetung der heiligen drei Könige” at fol. 17recto, and the Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte reproduces it as cod. 24, fol. 17, from the Marburg negative 59 675. Its position in the book follows the order of the liturgical year on which the lectionary is built. The Massacre of the Innocents (fol. 15v), read for the feast of the Holy Innocents, comes before it and the Presentation in the Temple (fol. 18r), read for the Purification, follows it, so the image falls naturally at the Epiphany, whose Gospel in the Roman rite is Matthew 2:1–12.

The composition joins two moments within a single frame. In the upper left the three Magi appear as half-length figures, crowned and carrying long staffs or lances, and point towards an eight-pointed gold star at the upper right; a study of the veneration of the Magi in the city and diocese of Trier describes them as shown “auf einer Wolke” (on a cloud) and looking down on the main scene. Below, the same three kings reach the enthroned Virgin. Two have thrown themselves to the ground, and the third bows deeply as he offers a vessel, which that study reads as holding three golden spheres, perhaps standing for the three gifts.

This doubling of figures, in which the same protagonists appear twice in one pictorial field, is the continuous narrative familiar from Late Antique and Early Christian art. The vision of the star itself also had a Late Antique past: the lid of the fourth-century Adelphia sarcophagus in Syracuse shows the Magi travelling with the first of them pointing at the star. The RDK, however, notes that the separate scene of the Magi seeing the star does not appear in Carolingian art and returns in a few Ottonian manuscripts joined to the Adoration. Of these the Codex Egberti is the clearest case, because the star the upper kings point to also serves as the sign above the Adoration. The two episodes therefore share one star rather than standing as two pictures side by side.

The Adoration itself rests on a scheme fixed in the fourth century. On the Vatican “Dogmatic Sarcophagus” the Virgin already sits enthroned with the Child on her lap and her feet on a low platform, with Joseph standing behind the throne, and these are the elements the Egberti painter takes up. The Virgin is nimbed in gold and sits on a box throne with a red cushion and a footstool (suppedaneum) in front of a stone house with a red-tiled roof, a detail that agrees with Matthew’s statement that the Magi entered “the house”. According to one description the nimbed Child holds an open book in his left hand and stretches his right towards the first king. Joseph stands behind the throne without a nimbus, like the kings. The prostration of two Magi, which has been linked to proskynesis in Byzantine court ceremonial, and the deep bow of the bearer of gifts carry over into court terms the old Roman image of foreigners paying homage to a ruler. That image had shaped Early Christian Magi scenes from the start.

Two features set the miniature apart within the history of the subject. The Magi wear crowns instead of the Phrygian caps of Early Christian art, and the RDK names the Codex Egberti as the first work in which they are “clearly marked as kings”, alongside the roughly contemporary Menologion of Basil II. The Magi are also labelled. Gold inscriptions in the field have been transcribed as PUDIZAR, CASPAR and MELCHIAS, and a 1980 philological survey of the names given to unnamed New Testament figures judges that, among manuscript representations of the Magi identified by name, “the oldest example appears to be a miniature in the famous Codex Egberti”.

The forms are unusual. The oldest written list, in the Excerpta Latina Barbari, a Latin translation of a sixth-century Alexandrian chronicle, gives “Bithisarea, Melchior, Gathaspa”, and the triad that later became standard in the West was Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. In Egbert’s book Caspar keeps its standard form, Melchias is a variant of Melchior, and Pudizar stands where Balthasar would be expected. The idea that Pudizar is a corrupted descendant of Bithisarea is attractive given the shared opening consonant cluster, but it is an inference and is not established. The labels count as documented evidence that the names circulated in Ottonian Trier or Reichenau. Their exact source is still an open question.

The attribution needs care. In the German reference literature the Gregory Master is credited with seven of the codex’s Gospel miniatures, listed as fols. 9v, 10v, 12r, 13r, 15v, 22r and 22v. The catalogue records accordingly tag the Annunciation, Visitation, Dream of Joseph, Nativity and Massacre of the Innocents as his, but not the Magi miniature. Although fol. 17r falls within the opening run of the cycle, it is therefore assigned to the collaborating painters.

Facsimile publishers identify these with “the monks Kerald and Heribert von der Reichenau” shown in the dedication picture, but that reading of the two monks as makers of the book has been challenged by Hartmut Hoffmann. This assignment is a matter of exclusion: no source names the specific hand. The mixed authorship of the book makes the point important. Facsimile Finder’s codicological description speaks of “two illuminators working under the master’s supervision, perhaps—at least in some instances—painting over his underdrawings”. The technical study “‘Materia’ und ‘Ingenium’” in the 1993 Egbert volume reported, as summarised in the reference literature, that only the Gregory Master used azurite and washed underdrawing in this manuscript.

Stylistically, the miniature shares the codex’s characteristic soft, graded ground, here a pale rose, which the facsimile literature singles out as the cycle’s evocation of atmosphere. It also has the gold-and-purple framing common to the Gospel miniatures, here built of marbled, brick-like tiles. The figures are carefully spaced along two diagonals of movement, from the star down to the kings and from the kings across to the throne, so that the story reads clearly even if the modelling and drapery lack the monumental calm usually given to the Master’s own pages. The later Reichenau tradition offers documentable comparisons.

The Munich Gospels of Otto III (Clm 4453, fol. 29r) recast the Adoration with a cornucopia in one king’s hand, echoing the provinces paying homage to the emperor. In the Reichenau Gospels from Limburg an der Haardt (Cologne, Dombibliothek, Cod. 218) the kings look not at the Child but at the star, towards which Mary also lifts her gaze. Within Trier the codex later served as the model for the pericope book of Archbishop Kuno von Falkenstein around 1380 (Trier, Domschatz, Cod. 66), in which, according to a study of archiepiscopal representation in Trier, “some of the illuminations were precisely imitated”.

“A Light to Lighten the Gentiles”: The Presentation in the Temple in the Codex Egberti, fol. 18r

The Presentation in the Temple occupies fol. 18r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), immediately after the Adoration of the Magi on fol. 17r.

Its liturgical setting deserves a word of caution. In the Roman tradition the Presentation, Luke 2:22–32, is the Gospel of the Purification on 2 February, but the miniature stands here between the Epiphany (fol. 17r) and the Twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple (fol. 18v). Within Luke 2, the passage containing Simeon’s words to Mary (2:33–40) was read on the Sunday within the octave of Christmas. The 1884 edition gives the text as Luke 2:22–38, a range that covers both readings.

The five figures are named by gold inscriptions, transcribed in 1884 as IOSEHP (sic), SCA MARIA, SYMEON, IHS XPC and ANNA. They are arranged in a frieze across a graded ground that passes from pale rose through blue into a strip of green. The 1884 edition calls it “rothblau”. There is no architecture. The Temple is represented by a single object at the centre of the composition: a red, box-shaped altar standing on stepped bases, its top covered with a cloth patterned in gold. The whole scene turns on this altar.

At the left stands Joseph, nimbed, in a white tunic and a red mantle, as the 1884 edition records. In his hands, partly wrapped in the folds of his mantle, he holds a white bird: the offering prescribed by the Law, “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:24). Next to him Mary, nimbed and dressed entirely in green, with a green veil and mantle, extends her hands towards the Child. Christ, labelled IHS XPC and marked by a gold nimbus, is shown not as a swaddled infant but as a small boy in a blue garment, the colour the 1884 edition records. He sits on or above the altar and stretches his hands towards Simeon.

Simeon, nimbed, bearded and long-haired, bends forward from the right to receive him. He wears a red-purple mantle, which the 1884 edition calls violet, and his hands are covered with a green cloth. The covered hands are an old ceremonial gesture inherited from Late Antique court practice, in which sacred or precious things were received with veiled hands as a sign of reverence. Their presence here signals that Simeon receives not an ordinary child but a holy object. Behind him stands the prophetess Anna, nimbed, in a blue-violet robe with a green veil, raising both hands in acclamation. In Luke 2:38 she “gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem”.

The placement of the Child on or above the altar is the composition’s most significant feature. In the Gospel narrative Simeon simply takes the child in his arms. Here the moment of transfer is staged across the altar, so that the Child appears for an instant as an offering placed upon it. Reading this as an allusion to Christ’s sacrifice and to the Eucharist is an interpretation rather than a documented intention, but the visual emphasis is unmistakable, and the Presentation was understood in medieval exegesis as the first offering of Christ in the Temple. The detail of the doves in Joseph’s hands, the lesser sacrifice prescribed by the Law, sets the old offering beside the new.

The composition is symmetrical and carefully balanced. Mary and Simeon frame the altar and the Child at the centre, their bodies bending towards one another. Joseph at the left and Anna at the right close the group at either end. The gestures converge on the Child: Mary’s extended hands, Simeon’s veiled hands, Anna’s raised palms.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters. They are tall and somewhat elongated. The drapery is rendered in broad areas of strong colour with gold highlights along the edges, and the faces follow a limited range of types with large dark eyes. Christ appears as a small boy with an adult’s proportions, a feature common to the cycle. The painting has suffered some losses, notably in Simeon’s green cloth and in parts of Mary’s mantle, but the composition and the colour scheme of red, green and blue against the pale ground remain clear.

“Sitting in the Midst of the Doctors”: The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple in the Codex Egberti, fol. 18v

The Twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple occupies fol. 18v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), on the back of the leaf that carries the Presentation. It is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master, so it is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Its liturgical setting fits the surrounding sequence well. In the Roman tradition Luke 2:42–52 is the Gospel of the Sunday within the octave of the Epiphany. That places the miniature naturally between the Adoration of the Magi (fol. 17r) and the Baptism of Christ (fol. 19v), which illustrates the reading for the octave day itself.

The Gospel tells how, at the age of twelve, Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem after the Passover. His parents searched for him for three days and finally found him in the Temple, “sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers” (Luke 2:46–47). The miniature combines this scene of teaching with the arrival of Joseph and Mary. It thus presents two moments of the narrative in a single frieze of figures that reads from left to right.

At the far left stand Joseph and Mary, labelled IOSEPH and S(ANCTA) MARIA. Joseph, in a white tunic and red mantle, has the white hair that the 1884 edition singles out as the only light-coloured hair in the scene. He appears without a nimbus, whereas on the preceding Presentation he is nimbed. He raises his hands in a gesture of address.

Mary is nimbed in gold. She wears a red veil and a grey mantle, presses one hand to her cheek, and stretches the other forward towards the group of doctors. The hand raised to the face is an ancient gesture of grief and anxiety. Here it gives visual form to her words to her son: “Behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” (dolentes quaerebamus te, Luke 2:48). The parents arrive at the edge of the scene and remain outside the circle of discussion, as the text implies.

The doctors, labelled SENIOR(ES), “elders”, occupy the centre and the right of the composition. Two sit on a long stepped bench with orange cushions. One, in a green mantle, turns to lay a hand on his neighbour’s shoulder while gesturing with the other hand towards Christ. His companion, in grey, raises his open palms. At the right two further doctors stand or sit close together. All the doctors are drawn with dark hair and smooth, youthful faces, despite the label that calls them elders. This is a convention of the painter’s figure types rather than an intentional characterisation.

Their gestures, a hand laid on a neighbour’s shoulder, open palms, attentive inclined heads, illustrate the astonishment of Luke 2:47. They turn the group into an image of debate in which the doctors consult among themselves while listening to the child.

Christ himself, labelled IHC XPC and marked by a gold nimbus, sits at the right of centre on a separate cushioned seat, with his feet on a footstool. He is slightly raised above the bench of the doctors. He wears a pale tunic with a red mantle across his lap and holds a white scroll, which he unrolls towards the doctor facing him while the latter grasps its other end.

The scroll shared between Christ and the doctor is the visual centre of the scene. It represents the Scriptures over which they converse, and it shows the child not simply listening but expounding. The arrangement, with Christ enthroned on his own seat and the doctors grouped around him, assimilates the scene to the image of a teacher in his chair. It anticipates the Christ who will later teach with authority.

The composition is a horizontal frieze set against a ground of streaked violet-rose. The 1884 edition calls it “rothblau”, and it is unrelieved by any architecture. The Temple is suggested only by the long bench and the seat of Christ. The 1884 edition lists the garments from left to right as red, grey, green, grey, red, grey and green. The colours alternate across the frieze so that the eye moves steadily from the parents at the left to Christ at the right.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: tall, somewhat elongated bodies; drapery in broad planes with gold highlights; and faces repeating a single type with dark hair and large eyes. The narrative is nonetheless clear and the grouping lively. Christ is distinguished from the doctors by his nimbus, his separate seat and the scroll, without any difference of scale.

“Behold the Lamb of God”: The Baptism of Christ in the Codex Egberti, fol. 19v

The Baptism of Christ occupies fol. 19v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 1:29–32, with parallels in Matthew 3:16 and Mark 1:10. The choice of the Johannine account is significant. In the Roman tradition John 1:29–34 is the Gospel for the octave day of the Epiphany. The 1884 edition also notes that the calendar of the codex, on the following leaf, assigns the octave of the Epiphany to a specific weekday. The miniature therefore belongs to the Epiphany sequence: the Magi (fol. 17r), the Twelve-year-old Jesus (fol. 18v), the Baptism (fol. 19v) and Cana (fol. 20v). This sequence corresponds to the three manifestations of Christ celebrated in the Epiphany liturgy.

The Johannine pericope does not narrate the baptism itself. It records the Baptist’s testimony: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world… I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him” (John 1:29, 32). The painter nevertheless represents the event, combining the testimony of John with the synoptic details of the descending dove and the opened heavens.

Christ stands at the centre, nimbed, naked and frontal, immersed up to the chest in the Jordan. The river does not flow across the picture as a horizontal stream. It rises around his body in a tall, rounded mound of water that envelops him like a transparent hill, and the 1884 edition calls the water greenish. This “heaped-up” Jordan is a convention of Early Christian and Byzantine art, inherited by the Carolingian and Ottonian painters. It allows Christ’s body to be seen through the water while the river remains the frame of the scene. Its exegetical resonance, the waters that stood up at Israel’s crossing of the Jordan (Joshua 3:16), was often invoked in the tradition, but no explicit link to that passage has been documented for this miniature.

At the left stands John the Baptist, nimbed and bearded, in a white tunic and a blue mantle, as recorded in the 1884 description. He lays his right hand on Christ’s head in the gesture of baptism. At the right stand two angels, nimbed and winged, their wings blue in the 1884 description. Their hands are hidden in the folds of their mantles. In many Baptism images the attending angels hold Christ’s garments with veiled hands, ready to clothe him after the immersion; here the veiled hands carry the same reverent sense.

From the top of the picture a beam of rays descends towards Christ’s head. Within it the dove of the Holy Spirit swoops downwards, its own nimbus marking it as divine. This is the visual equivalent of John’s words,

vidi Spiritum descendentem quasi columbam de caelo, et mansit super eum.

The vertical axis formed by the rays, the dove and the frontal figure of Christ is the backbone of the composition. The Baptist and the angels frame it symmetrically on either side.

Gold inscriptions name the protagonists: IOHANNES above the Baptist, IHC XPC beside Christ, and ANGELI above the angels.

The composition is one of the most strictly symmetrical in the cycle. Its clarity derives from the tradition of the Baptism image, in which the central figure of Christ, the descending dove and the flanking figures of the Baptist and the angels had long been fixed. The painter’s contribution lies less in invention than in the balanced distribution of the figures across the field and in the luminous treatment of the water.

Water into Wine: The Miracle at Cana in the Codex Egberti, fol. 20v

The miniature of the Miracle at Cana occupies fol. 20v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The photographic record of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg catalogues it as “Weinwunder auf der Hochzeit zu Kana, Folio 20verso”. It describes the subject in two moments: Mary telling Christ that the wine has run out, and Christ ordering the (six) jars to be filled with water. Kraus’s 1884 edition reproduces it as plate XIX, with the pericope given as John 2:1–11.

Its place in the manuscript follows the logic of the liturgical year. The Baptism, illustrating John 1:29–32, stands on fol. 19v; Cana follows on fol. 20v; the Healing of the Leper (Matthew 8:1–4) comes on fol. 21r. In the Roman Mass lectionary these three readings belong to the Epiphany season: the octave of Epiphany, then the second and third Sundays after Epiphany. The Healing of the Centurion’s Servant that completes Matthew 8:1–13 duly appears on fol. 22r.

Read in sequence after the Adoration of the Magi on fol. 17r, the miniatures therefore spell out the threefold manifestation that the Epiphany liturgy itself celebrated. The Benedictus antiphon of the feast joins the Magi, the Jordan and the transformation of water into wine in a single nuptial image of the Church wedded to her heavenly Bridegroom. That the Codex Egberti’s designers had this antiphon specifically in mind cannot be shown. That the picture sequence and the liturgical theme coincide follows from the order of the readings themselves.

The relationship between image and text is unusually direct. The miniature does not stand before the pericope as a frontispiece but interrupts it.

The line above the frame carries the end of John 2:2,

[vocatus] est autem et Ihs et discipuli eius ad nuptias.

The line below, opening with a display capital, resumes with John 2:3,

Et deficiente vino dicit mater Ihu ad eum: Vinu[m non habent].

The picture is thus placed at the precise hinge of the narrative, between the arrival of Christ at the wedding and his mother’s intervention. That intervention is exactly what the miniature shows.

The composition is strikingly reduced. There is no banquet table, no bride or bridegroom, no steward tasting the wine, and no architecture. The figures stand on a strip of green ground beneath a graded sky that Kraus described as red-violet above and green towards the earth. That soft, banded ground is characteristic of the whole cycle. The scene is built from three groups, each identified by a gold label: MINISTRI over the two servants at the left, SCA MARIA over the Virgin, and IHC XPC over Christ. The term ministri is taken from the Vulgate wording of John 2:5 and 2:9, where Mary addresses the servants and they alone know where the wine came from.

At the left, the two youths wear short tunics and hose. One tips a large ewer into a jar at his feet, while the other turns towards the vessels with both hands open, a gesture of wonder or readiness. The jars stand in two groups of three, one before the servants and one between Mary and Christ, so that the painting keeps faithfully to the six stone water jars of John 2:6. The Marburg description likewise counts six.

The Virgin, in a blue mantle over a green gown and nimbed in gold, occupies the centre. One hand is raised with the palm outward and the other is extended towards her son, so that her body visually connects the servants and Christ. In this way the painter renders her twofold role in the text, speaking to Christ (“they have no wine”) and to the servants (“whatever he tells you, do it”). Christ, standing barefoot at the right in a purple pallium over a pale tunic, holds a book in his left hand and stretches his right towards the jars.

This gesture marks a significant departure from Early Christian practice. On fourth-century sarcophagi and in catacomb painting, the Cana miracle was typically reduced to Christ alone touching the jars with a wonder-worker’s rod, the virga, and the wedding itself played no part. The Egberti painter retains the Early Christian focus on the miracle rather than the feast, as well as the paratactic arrangement of figures and vessels in a shallow frieze. Yet he dispenses with the rod and replaces it with the speaking hand. He also gives the narrative’s human agents, Mary and the servants, a prominence that the abbreviated sarcophagus type lacked. Whether this reflects a lost intermediate model or an Ottonian reworking cannot be settled from the surviving evidence.

As to authorship, the Gregory Master’s personal contribution to the codex is conventionally limited to the miniatures on fols. 9v, 10v, 12r, 13r, 15v, 22r and 22v. Cana is not among them, and the catalogue records do not tag it as his. It is therefore given to the collaborating painters who executed the greater part of the cycle, possibly over the Master’s designs. Like the comparable assignment of fol. 17r, this is an attribution by exclusion rather than a positive identification of a hand.

Stylistically, the figures are lighter and more summary than those on the Gregory Master’s pages. The servants’ features are drawn with a few brisk strokes, and the drapery of the Virgin and Christ falls in long parallel folds rather than the weighty, sculptural masses of the Master’s own figures. The clarity of the design is nonetheless considerable. The three groups are spaced across the field in a calm rhythm, and the eye moves from left to right along the chain of gestures, from the work of the servants through the intercession of Mary to the command of Christ, reading the miracle as a sequence of action, petition and power.

“Lord, if thou wilt”: The Healing of the Leper in the Codex Egberti, fol. 21v

The Healing of the Leper occupies fol. 21v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is reproduced as plate XX in Kraus’s 1884 edition, which identifies the text as Matthew 8:1–4 with parallels in Mark 1:40–41 and Luke 5:12–14. The reading belongs to the Epiphany season. In the Roman Mass lectionary, Matthew 8:1–13 is the Gospel of the third Sunday after Epiphany, and the codex divides it between two images: the leper here, and the centurion of Capernaum on fol. 22r. The calendar of the manuscript bears out this context. Kraus, following the analysis of the codex’s pericope list by Karl Lamprecht, notes that fol. 20 places the octave of Epiphany on the Wednesday after the first Sunday after Epiphany. That datum was used in the nineteenth century to argue about when the text was planned.

This placement produces one of the most instructive openings in the manuscript. Fol. 21v faces fol. 22r, so the leper and the centurion are seen side by side when the book lies open. The Centurion is among the seven miniatures conventionally given to the Gregory Master (fols. 9v, 10v, 12r, 13r, 15v, 22r, 22v). The Leper is not, and it falls by exclusion to his collaborators. The reader therefore sees, across a single opening, the work of the Master and of one of his assistants illustrating the two halves of one liturgical reading.

The composition reads clearly from left to right. A compact group of apostles stands at the left, labelled in gold APLI (apostoli). Their heads overlap in the shorthand for a crowd familiar from Late Antique art, with only the foremost figures given full bodies. In front of them, and set apart by a gold nimbus, stands an apostle with white hair and a short white beard. This is Peter, identifiable by the type that Kraus observed throughout the codex, where Peter alone among the apostles has white hair. He raises both hands with open palms, a gesture of wonder or witness.

Christ stands at the centre, labelled IHC XPC. He wears a purple pallium over a pale tunic, has a gold nimbus, and appears beardless with long dark hair. He turns towards the right and lifts his right hand with two fingers extended, the conventional gesture of speech and blessing. At the far right, beneath the gold label LEPROSUS, the leper approaches in a half-crouch, one knee bent, stretching out his open hand to Christ. His bare flesh is covered with dark spots, and he wears only a short wrap knotted at the shoulder. Across his chest runs a cord from which a white horn hangs at his side. Kraus interpreted it as the warning instrument with which a leper had to announce his approach, citing the Levitical law of uncleanness (Leviticus 13:45). The text itself speaks of a verbal cry, so the horn reflects later practice brought into the biblical scene. It is the miniature’s most vivid realistic detail.

The painter has chosen a precise moment in the narrative. Matthew says that the leper came and worshipped Christ (adorabat eum), saying “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean,” and that Jesus, stretching out his hand, touched him. The miniature does not show the touch. The two hands, Christ’s raised in blessing and the leper’s extended in petition, remain separated by an empty interval of green ground. The image is thus suspended between the request and the healing, between si vis and volo, mundare. Whether this reflects a model or a choice specific to the Egberti painter cannot be determined from the surviving evidence. Its effect, however, is to turn the narrative into an exchange of gestures. The leper’s crouching approach also renders visually the attitude of supplication that the Gospel calls adoration.

The figures are set on a narrow strip of ground that rises from left to right in a pale ochre band beneath the apostles and Christ and opens into a broad green field beneath the leper. Above, the graded sky passes from pale tones into rose. Kraus described the ground of this page as blue above and then red. The frame is the type used across much of the cycle: a dark red band with gold lozenges and bars.

Stylistically, the miniature shows the qualities usually associated with the collaborating hands. The figures are elongated and stand a little stiffly. Drapery is rendered in long, parallel folds and simple highlights, and the faces, especially those of the apostles, repeat a limited range of types with large dark eyes. The leper is the most freely observed figure. His bent pose and his spotted, emaciated body convey both his illness and his urgency, and his position at the edge of the picture, isolated from the group, makes visible his exclusion from the community. The juxtaposition with the facing Centurion, with its weightier, more statuesque figures, shows that the difference between the Master and his collaborators lies less in the iconographic programme, which was very likely shared, than in the handling of form.

“Speak the Word Only”: Christ and the Centurion of Capernaum in the Codex Egberti, fol. 22r

Christ and the Centurion of Capernaum occupies fol. 22r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It illustrates the second half of Matthew 8:1–13, the Gospel of the third Sunday after Epiphany in the Roman Mass lectionary. The first half of that reading, the Healing of the Leper, is painted on fol. 21v, so the two miniatures face each other across a single opening.

The pairing is unusually revealing. The Leper is the work of one of the collaborating painters. The Centurion is among the seven miniatures conventionally attributed to the Gregory Master himself, an attribution recorded in the photographic catalogue of the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. The reader of the open book therefore sees one liturgical reading illustrated by two hands of markedly different calibre.

The composition is one of the most severely balanced in the cycle. Two groups of figures confront each other across an empty central interval, on a strip of green ground beneath a pale sky that shades from white into rose. The 1884 plate edition described it as “white and reddish”. At the left stand the apostles, labelled in gold APLI, with Peter, labelled PETR, in front. Christ stands at the centre-left, labelled IHS XPC and marked by a gold cross-nimbus. At the right the centurion, labelled CENTURIO, leads a group of men whose label reads SENIOR(ES) IUD(AEORUM), “elders of the Jews”.

That last inscription is a small but significant piece of exegesis. The pericope read on this day is Matthew’s account, in which the centurion comes to Christ in person. The elders of the Jews belong only to Luke’s version, where the centurion sends them to intercede on his behalf (Luke 7:3). The 1884 edition already pointed to the Lucan source of the label. The miniature thus harmonises the two Gospels: it keeps Matthew’s personal encounter but adds the Lucan intercessors as the centurion’s escort. Whether this conflation was invented for the Codex Egberti or inherited from a model cannot be established.

The confrontation is staged entirely through gesture, and here the choice of moment is decisive. Neither the paralysed servant nor the house in Capernaum appears. The miracle the Gospel describes is a healing at a distance, accomplished by word alone, and the painter shows exactly that and nothing more. The centurion stands upright, not kneeling as the Marburg catalogue description states, and stretches out his open right hand towards Christ. The gesture corresponds to his plea that Christ need not come under his roof but “speak the word only” (tantum dic verbo, Matthew 8:8).

Christ answers with the most emphatic gesture in the composition. Holding a gold-edged book against his body with his left hand, he extends his right arm and points his index finger directly at the centurion. Read against the text, this is the moment of the healing command, “Go, and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee” (Matthew 8:13). The empty space between the two figures is thus not a void but the interval across which the word passes. The composition makes visible an act of speech, and with it the faith that Christ praised as greater than any he had found in Israel.

Behind Christ, Peter raises his right hand with the palm outward, as do the apostle beside him and others in the group. Peter holds a scroll in his left hand. He is identified both by his label and by the white hair and beard that distinguish him throughout the cycle. Their gesture of astonishment answers Christ’s words to his followers, Amen dico vobis, and adds a second audience to the exchange.

The painter differentiates the two groups through dress with deliberate care. Christ and the apostles wear the white tunic and pallium of Early Christian art and go barefoot, the established convention for sacred figures. The centurion and the elders wear shorter tunics, cloaks fastened at the shoulder, and shoes with bound leggings. The centurion’s brilliant red-orange cloak, clasped with a brooch, marks him as a Roman officer in the costume of Late Antiquity. The 1884 description lists the mantles in sequence, from blue, red and purple among the apostles, through the violet of Christ and the reddish cloak of the centurion, to the green, purple and yellow of the elders.

One further detail distinguishes this page from its neighbours. Here Christ is bearded, with long dark hair parted in the centre. In the collaborators’ miniatures of Cana (fol. 20v) and the Leper (fol. 21v) he appears youthful and beardless. Both types were current in Early Christian art. Whether the variation reflects different models, different hands, or a deliberate distinction is not settled by the evidence available, and the beard should not be taken as a sign of the change of painter across the opening (see the Rescue of Peter, fol. 27v).

The qualities that have made the Gregory Master the most admired painter of the Ottonian period are fully present. The figures are tall and statuesque, with comparatively small heads. They stand with a calm weight. The drapery is organised into broad, clearly articulated planes, the deep folds of the pallium swinging across the body in large curves outlined in gold. The faces are individualised within a restrained range of types: the centurion’s dark beard and the grey heads of the elders are distinguished as carefully as the apostles.

Above all, the composition depends on interval and proportion rather than on crowding or incident. The two groups are held apart by an expanse of empty ground almost as wide as either of them, and the whole is enclosed in the codex’s characteristic frame of a dark red band with gold lozenges and bars.

“He Touched Her Hand, and the Fever Left Her”: The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law in the Codex Egberti, fol. 22v

The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law occupies fol. 22v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is the last of the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master, and it stands on the back of the leaf whose recto carries his Christ and the Centurion. Both sides of fol. 22 are therefore by the Master’s own hand. The two images illustrate consecutive passages of Matthew 8: the centurion of verses 5–13 and the healing in Peter’s house in verses 14–15.

The 1884 plate edition gives a small piece of historiography. It records that an earlier nineteenth-century description had mistaken the scene for the healing of the centurion’s servant, which immediately precedes it in the text, and it corrects the identification. Matthew 8:14–15 is not a Sunday Gospel in the later Roman missal.

Matthew’s account is brief: “And when Jesus was come into Peter’s house, he saw his wife’s mother laid, and sick of a fever. And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose, and ministered unto them.” The painter divides the scene into three groups. At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI in gold. Four bearded heads are visible, and the two foremost figures hold white books against their chests. The 1884 edition lists their mantles as ochre and red. At the centre stands Christ, labelled IHC XPC, with a gold cross-nimbus. He is bearded and wears a white tunic beneath a violet pallium, the colour given in the 1884 edition. He is barefoot and raises his right hand towards the sick woman.

At the right, before a building with a pediment and a columned front that stands for Peter’s house, the woman lies on a curved couch draped in green. She is dressed and veiled in white, and the 1884 edition notes that both her tunic and her wrappings are white. She lifts both hands towards Christ. Behind her a man in a red-yellow or ochre mantle and a soft cap bends over her. He supports her head with one hand and extends the other towards Christ, as if presenting the sick woman or pleading on her behalf. His identity is not established by an inscription. Throughout the codex Peter is given white hair and no cap, so this figure is more likely a member of the household than the apostle himself. The Gospel names no such person, and the identification must remain open.

As in the Healing of the Leper (fol. 21v), Christ does not touch the sick person, although the text explicitly says that he touched her hand. His raised hand and her uplifted hands meet across a short interval of space, so that the miracle is represented as an exchange of gestures rather than a physical contact. The woman’s raised hands and the slight lifting of her upper body from the couch anticipate her rising, et surrexit. The image therefore holds the moment between the healing word and its effect.

The composition displays the Gregory Master’s characteristic economy. The three groups are clearly separated, the apostles at the left standing on a strip of green ground and the sick woman’s couch rising diagonally towards the right. The couch’s long, curved outline creates a strong movement that leads from Christ’s feet up to the head of the woman and her attendant. The architecture behind, rendered in pale tones and almost dissolving into the background, provides a setting without competing with the figures. The ground shades from pale rose above to green below; the 1884 edition calls it “rothblau” with green earth.

The figures have the weight and calm that distinguish the Master from his collaborators: broad drapery planes, firmly modelled heads, deliberate gestures. As on the Centurion on the other side of the leaf, Christ is bearded. On several collaborators’ pages (Cana, fol. 20v; the Leper, fol. 21v; the Withered Hand, fol. 23v; the Storm, fol. 24r) he appears beardless, but this is not a reliable criterion of attribution: he is bearded again on fol. 27v, a page not given to the Master.

“Stretch Forth Thy Hand”: The Healing of the Man with the Withered Hand in the Codex Egberti, fol. 23v

The Healing of the Man with the Withered Hand occupies fol. 23v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Mark 3:1–5, with parallels in Matthew 12:10–14 and Luke 6:6. The miniature follows the Gregory Master’s Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law on fol. 22v. It precedes the Calming of the Storm (fol. 24r) and the Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood (fol. 24v). It thus belongs to the dense sequence of miracle scenes that fills the early part of the cycle.

The Gospel narrative has a polemical frame. Christ enters the synagogue on the Sabbath, where a man with a withered hand is present, and his opponents watch to see whether he will heal on the Sabbath so that they may accuse him. Christ asks whether it is lawful to do good or evil on the Sabbath, to save life or to destroy it. Meeting only silence, and grieved by the hardness of their hearts, he tells the man to stretch out his hand, and it is restored. Mark adds that the Pharisees then went out and took counsel with the Herodians against him (3:6).

The miniature renders this double action, healing and hostility, with remarkable economy. The synagogue of Mark 3:1 is not represented at all. As on other pages of the cycle, the figures stand on an open strip of ground, here yellowish, beneath a pale reddish sky. The 1884 edition describes them as “Erde gelb” and “Hintergrund röthlich”. The drama is carried entirely by the arrangement of three groups.

At the far left stand two men labelled in gold SENIOR(ES), “elders”. This is the same designation the codex uses for the Jewish authorities in other scenes. One is dark-haired and bearded in a reddish mantle. The other is grey-haired, wears a dark cloak over a white tunic, and raises a hand to his chest. They lean their heads together as if conferring. They wear shoes and coloured leggings, the dress that marks secular and non-apostolic figures throughout the manuscript. Their position, turned slightly away from Christ, and their whispered exchange read naturally as the Gospel’s “watching” opponents. They may anticipate the counsel against Christ with which Mark’s narrative closes. That the painter intended this specific allusion is an interpretation, not a documented fact, but it is the most economical reading of a pair of figures who take no part in the miracle yet are given the most prominent label after Christ’s own.

Christ stands at the centre, labelled IHC XPC and marked by a gold nimbus with a red rim. He appears youthful and beardless, with a purple-brown pallium over a white tunic. As in the collaborators’ miniatures of Cana (fol. 20v) and the Leper (fol. 21v), he differs from the bearded Christ of the Gregory Master’s Centurion on fol. 22r. Close behind him stand two apostles, one of them white-haired, in keeping with the type used for Peter throughout the cycle. That apostle raises his open palm in a gesture of witness. A small gold inscription above the apostles is damaged. Christ extends his right hand towards the sick man with two fingers raised, the conventional sign of speech:

Extende manum tuam, “Stretch forth thy hand.”

At the right, separated from Christ by a wide interval of empty ground, the man with the withered hand bends forward. He wears a short ochre tunic, dark leggings and boots. He holds out his right hand, curled and stiff, while his left hand supports it from below. The painter shows the very instant of obedience. The man stretches out the hand as he is commanded, but it is not yet visibly restored. The healing is thus located, as the text locates it, in the act of extending the hand at Christ’s word. The stooping posture, the supporting hand and the cramped fingers make the affliction legible without exaggeration. Together they give the figure a quiet pathos that contrasts with the guarded stillness of the elders on the other side.

The composition shows how closely the collaborating painters worked within the conventions established for the cycle, very probably under the Gregory Master’s direction. The essential scheme is the same as that of the Master’s Centurion on fol. 22r: Christ with his apostles, a speaking gesture across an empty interval, and the recipient of the miracle isolated on the far side. Here, however, the scheme is reversed in its distribution. The hostile witnesses stand behind Christ rather than behind the petitioner. This turns the Sabbath controversy into a visual structure in which Christ stands between the guarded elders and the suffering man and turns his back on the former to heal the latter.

The figures themselves show the characteristics of the collaborators’ hands. They are lighter in build and less monumental than the Master’s. The drapery is rendered in summary folds with simple highlights, and the faces are drawn in a few brisk strokes. Yet the narrative clarity is considerable. The three groups are distinguished by dress, gesture and spacing.

“Lord, Save Us”: The Calming of the Storm in the Codex Egberti, fol. 24r

The Calming of the Storm occupies fol. 24r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies its text as Matthew 8:23–26, with parallels in Mark 4:38–40 and Luke 8:22–25. In the Roman Mass lectionary Matthew 8:23–27 is the Gospel of the fourth Sunday after Epiphany. If the codex follows that order, as its preceding miniatures suggest, the image continues the Epiphany-season sequence of miracles from Matthew 8 that begins with the Leper (fol. 21v) and the Centurion (fol. 22r).

The miniature is one of the clearest examples in the cycle of continuous narrative: two successive moments of the story are combined in a single pictorial field and a single boat. Christ appears twice, each time identified by the gold label IHC XPC. At the left, in the stern, he lies asleep, his eyes closed and his head sunk against his shoulder. This illustrates Matthew’s laconic

ipse vero dormiebat (8:24).

At the right, in the prow, he stands awake and erect, raising his right hand with two fingers extended in the gesture of command. This is the moment in which he rebukes the winds and the sea and there follows a great calm

imperavit ventis et mari, et facta est tranquillitas magna, (8:26).

Between the two figures of Christ the apostles fill the hull. A white-haired apostle, Peter by the convention used throughout the cycle, bends over the sleeping Christ and lays a hand on him. He gives visual form to the disciples’ cry, “Lord, save us: we perish”

Domine, salva nos, perimus, (8:25).

Behind him the other apostles, one in a red mantle, a younger figure, and an older apostle in ochre, turn their heads towards the sleeper. Their bodies are compressed together in the boat, conveying both crowding and anxiety. A gold label above them identifies them as the apostles.

The reading proceeds from left to right, from sleep to awakening and from danger to command. The boat itself becomes the line along which the narrative unfolds, so that the viewer’s eye passes through the frightened disciples to arrive at the standing Christ in the prow.

The setting is reduced to a few essential elements. The boat is a broad, open hull with a scrolled stern and a prow carved as an animal’s head. The sea beneath it is rendered as rolling bands of waves crested with white foam, which the 1884 edition describes as whitish under a blue-white sky. In the upper right corner two dark heads blow across the sky. The 1884 edition identifies them as the wind gods, “als Thierköpfe geschildert” (represented as animal heads). The personified winds are a legacy of classical imagery, here reduced to little more than spirited heads. Their placement just above the standing Christ is precise: they are the target of his rebuke.

The same edition draws a comparison with the wall paintings of St. George at Reichenau-Oberzell, whose cycle of Christ’s miracles also includes the Storm on the Sea. Whether the two works depend on a shared model or one on the other has long been discussed and need not be settled here. The comparison is itself a reminder that the Codex Egberti belongs to the same pictorial world as the major monumental cycle of the Lake Constance region.

The juxtaposition of the sleeping and the commanding Christ within one image is the theological heart of the miniature. Sleep and authority are presented side by side, and the apostles’ faith is tested in the interval between them, a point the Gospel makes explicit in Christ’s reproach, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” The continuous narrative allows the painter to show both natures of the scene at once: the human Christ who sleeps in the storm and the divine Christ whom the winds and sea obey.

As to authorship, the miniature is not among the seven conventionally attributed to the Gregory Master (fols. 9v, 10v, 12r, 13r, 15v, 22r, 22v). It is therefore assigned by exclusion to the collaborating painters. Its handling is consistent with that assignment. The figures are small in scale and densely grouped, the faces summarily drawn, and the drapery rendered in simple folds with light highlights.

Christ, both asleep and awake, appears youthful and beardless, as on the other collaborators’ pages examined so far, in contrast to the bearded Christ of the Gregory Master’s Centurion on fol. 22r. The design nevertheless shows a lively sense of narrative movement. The swelling waves, the tilted heads of the apostles and the upward thrust of the standing Christ’s gesture give the scene an energy that the more static compositions of the healing miracles do not require.

“If I May but Touch His Garment”: The Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood in the Codex Egberti, fol. 24v

The Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood occupies fol. 24v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Matthew 9:18–22, with parallels in Mark 5:22–34 and Luke 8:41–48. In all three Gospels the episode is set inside another story. A ruler comes to beg Christ to raise his dead (or dying) daughter, and on the way a woman who has suffered from a flow of blood for twelve years touches the hem of his garment and is healed. The raising of the ruler’s daughter follows on fol. 25r. Fols. 24v and 25r therefore face each other across a single opening, so that the two interwoven halves of the Gospel narrative are seen together when the book lies open.

The composition is organised as a frieze of three groups on a strip of yellowish ground beneath a pale rose sky. The 1884 edition describes it as “röthlich”, with yellow earth.

At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI, with Peter, labelled PETR, in front. He is the only white-haired figure, as the 1884 edition notes, and wears a red mantle. He raises both hands in a gesture of address. In Luke’s version it is Peter who answers Christ’s question, “Who touched me?”, with the words “Master, the multitude throng thee and press thee” (Luke 8:45). The prominence given to his speaking gesture may reflect that text, although the 1884 edition cites the Matthean account as the reading.

At the centre stands Christ, labelled IHC XPC, nimbed in gold, in a white tunic and a violet pallium. He appears beardless with long dark hair, as on the other collaborators’ pages. His body moves towards the right and his right hand gestures towards the group there, but he turns his head back over his shoulder to look down at the woman behind him. The painter thus captures the exact moment of Matthew 9:22: at Iesus conversus et videns eam dixit, “But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said: Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.”

The woman crouches on the ground between Peter and Christ. She is wrapped in a dark blue mantle that covers her head, and she stretches out her hands towards the hem of Christ’s garment. A gold inscription beside her, transcribed in 1884 as FLUXUM PATIENS (“suffering a flow”), identifies her. On the page itself the label reads FLUXU(M) HABENS. Her small, crouching figure, bent almost to the ground behind Christ’s back, conveys both the secrecy of her approach and her humility: “she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole” (Matthew 9:21).

At the right stand the ruler and his companions, labelled PRINC(EPS), “the ruler”, and SENIOR(ES), “the elders”. The 1884 edition explains that they have come to call Christ to the dead daughter of Jairus. The ruler, grey-haired and bearded, wears a white tunic, a blue cloak, red hose and boots, and extends his open hand towards Christ. His companions behind him wear the same secular dress, the red leggings that the 1884 edition singles out, which distinguish them from the barefoot apostles and Christ. Their presence at the right edge of the picture keeps the larger narrative in view. Christ is on his way to the ruler’s house, and the healing of the woman takes place as an interruption on that path.

The composition renders this interruption through the double orientation of the central figure, in which the two strands of the Gospel narrative meet.

The painting shows the characteristics of the collaborating painters: elongated figures, broad areas of colour with gold highlights, faces repeating a limited range of types. Its narrative intelligence is nevertheless considerable. A visible condition note is the show-through or offset of text in the upper part of the sky, where lines of writing from the other side of the leaf, or from the facing page, appear faintly through the paint.

“She Is Not Dead, but Sleepeth”: The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter in the Codex Egberti, fol. 25r

The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter occupies fol. 25r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It faces the Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood on fol. 24v, so the two halves of the interwoven Gospel narrative appear side by side when the book lies open. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Matthew 9:23–26, with parallels in Mark 5:35–43 and Luke 8:49–56. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The Gospel tells how Christ, arriving at the ruler’s house, put out the mourners and the crowd, went in, “and took her by the hand, and the maid arose” (Matthew 9:25). Mark and Luke add that he took with him into the room only the child’s parents and Peter, James and John. The miniature is built on the distinction between those who remain outside and the miracle that takes place within.

At the left, outside the house, stand two groups labelled in gold SENIOR(ES) and AP(OSTOLI); the second label is only partly legible. The elder in front is grey-bearded and wears a white tunic, a blue cloak, red hose and boots, the red leggings the 1884 edition singles out for the elders. He raises his index finger in a gesture of speech, while a younger companion stands behind him. He may be the ruler himself or one of those who came to say that the girl had died (Mark 5:35); no inscription settles the point.

Facing him is a grey-haired apostle in a white tunic and red mantle, barefoot, with one hand laid on his breast. In accordance with the convention of the codex this is presumably Peter. A further apostle peers out from behind him. These figures are the witnesses who wait outside, or who have just been shut out of the house. Their animated exchange recalls the scorn of the mourners and the reports of the girl’s death that precede the miracle in the Gospel narrative.

The house is represented by two massive structures of ashlar masonry: a tall tower with a red tiled roof at the left of centre, and a long building with a gabled roof crowned by a crossed finial at the right. The 1884 edition records the walls as blue-white and the roof as red. Between them an arch spans the space, and from it hangs a red curtain, gathered and drawn aside, revealing the interior. The drawn curtain, the velum, is a convention inherited from Late Antique art for showing an inner room, and especially a sacred or privileged space. Here it marks the threshold between the crowd outside and the chamber where the miracle takes place. The tower closes the interior off from the group at the left, giving visual form to the Gospel’s cum eiecta esset turba, intravit, “when the people were put forth, he went in”.

Inside, Christ bends over the bed. He is nimbed in gold, appears beardless with long dark hair as on the other collaborators’ pages, and wears a white tunic with a violet pallium, the colour recorded in 1884. With both hands he takes the girl by the hand and wrist. The girl lies on a curved couch whose interior is red and whose exterior is violet, as the 1884 edition records. She is dressed and veiled in white, her body still stretched out, but her eyes are open and she looks up at Christ. The raising is shown at its first instant: life has returned to her face while her body has not yet risen.

The gesture of Christ is significant. On the neighbouring pages of the cycle, the Healing of the Leper (fol. 21v) and the Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law (fol. 22v), Christ heals by a raised hand across an interval of space, even though the text in both cases speaks of touch. Here, by contrast, he grasps the girl’s hand firmly. The painter thus follows the text exactly, tenuit manum eius, and makes the physical contact the visual centre of the miracle. Whether this difference reflects a different model, a different hand, or a deliberate choice for the raising of the dead cannot be established from the available evidence. It is nevertheless one of the most expressive details of the page.

The composition is clearly constructed. The curved line of the bed rises diagonally from left to right towards the girl’s head and Christ’s bending figure. The red of the curtain, the bed and the elders’ leggings ties the composition together chromatically against the pale ground and the blue-white masonry. The 1884 edition describes the ground as “weissröthlich”.

“Come Out of the Man, Thou Unclean Spirit”: The Gerasene Demoniac in the Codex Egberti, fol. 26v

The Healing of the Gerasene Demoniac occupies fol. 26v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is one of the most densely narrative pages of the cycle. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Mark 5:1–17, with parallels in Matthew 8:28–34 and Luke 8:26–37. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The image interrupts the pericope immediately after its first verse. The lines of text below it continue with Mark 5:2–4:

statim occurrit de monumentis homo in spiritu immundo… et neque catenis iam quisquam eum poterat ligare, quoniam saepe compedibus et catenis vinctus dirupisset catenas.

The miniature has an unusual vertical format and compresses into a single field the whole sequence of the Gospel story: the exorcism, the passage of the demons into the swine, the drowning of the herd, and the flight of the herdsmen to the city. The painter organises this sequence by means of the landscape. A rising green-yellow ground, the 1884 edition’s “grüngelb”, divides into two hills. A valley between them separates the upper zone of the page from the lower.

In the upper zone two walled towns stand on the hilltops at left and right, built of grey ashlar with red roofs. A figure looks out from a window in the left-hand town, and another peers round the tower of the right-hand one. A gold inscription runs across the top:

URBES GERASENORUM, “the cities of the Gerasenes”.

The 1884 edition flags the plural URBES with a “sic”, but it agrees with the painting, which shows two towns. It may also reflect the Gospel’s statement that the herdsmen told it “in the city, and in the country” (in civitatem et in agros, Mark 5:14).

Between the towns, labelled PASTORES, two pairs of herdsmen in white tunics, red mantles and violet hose hurry towards the gates, carrying long staffs or spears. Their bent, running postures convey haste and fear: “And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city.” The red of their mantles and the violet of their leggings are the colours recorded in 1884.

The lower zone presents the miracle itself, reading from left to right. At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI, the foremost grey-haired in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter. In front of them is Christ, labelled IHC XPC, with a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless with long hair, as on other collaborators’ pages, and wears an ochre tunic and a violet mantle; the 1884 edition gives ochre and violet. He raises his right hand with two fingers extended in the gesture of command, corresponding to the words of Mark 5:8:

Exi, spiritus immunde, ab homine.

Opposite him, at the centre, stands the possessed man. He wears a short grey-white tunic, the colour given in 1884. His long, dishevelled hair falls in a braid over his shoulder. His wrists are bound, and his ankles are held by iron fetters joined by a chain. These are the compedes and catenae of the text written immediately below the image. From the crown of his head a small dark spiky shape springs upward: the unclean spirit leaving him at Christ’s command. The painter has kept the chains on the man even at the moment of his deliverance. They are less a narrative detail than an attribute of his condition, the bonds that, according to the Gospel, no one could make hold.

At the right, labelled

GREX PORCORUM, “the herd of swine”,

four purple-violet pigs plunge headlong down a steep white slope towards the sea. The 1884 edition describes the sea as white and the swine as purple-violet. Above the topmost pig a further dark shape suggests the demons entering the animals. The swine’s downward rush illustrates Mark 5:13:

et magno impetu grex praecipitatus est in mare.

The composition is remarkable for the way it leads the eye around the page in a continuous movement. Christ’s commanding gesture is directed at the man. The demon rising from the man’s head points towards the swine. The swine’s plunge to the right is answered, above, by the herdsmen’s flight back towards the cities, and the cities in turn frame the whole narrative from the hilltops. Several moments of the story thus coexist in one landscape without confusion, held together by the clear separation of the zones and by the labels that name each group.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: compact bodies, lively and somewhat angular movements in the herdsmen, faces with large dark eyes. The narrative inventiveness of the page is considerable. The figure of the demoniac in particular, bound, wild-haired and frozen at the moment of release, is one of the most memorable in the cycle.

“Lord, Save Me”: Christ Rescuing Peter from the Waves in the Codex Egberti, fol. 27v

The miniature of Christ rescuing the sinking Peter occupies fol. 27v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies its text as Matthew 14:24–34, with parallels in Mark 6:47–54 and John 6:17–21. The episode is found only in Matthew. After the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples are crossing the lake by night in a boat “tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary”. Christ comes to them walking on the sea. Peter asks to come to him on the water and begins to walk, “but when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him” (Matthew 14:30–31). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The composition is laid out horizontally across a broad band of sea. White-crested waves in blue and white, the “blauweiss” of the 1884 description, fill the lower half of the picture above a strip of green shore. The sky above is pale and almost colourless.

At the left the apostles, labelled APLI, sit in a red boat whose prow ends in an animal’s head. The boat is the same type that appears in the Calming of the Storm on fol. 24r, and the 1884 edition gives it as red. One apostle, bearded, in a white tunic and red mantle, grips an oar. The others, one younger in a purple mantle and one grey-bearded in a blue mantle, raise their open hands in alarm and wonder and look towards Christ. Their gestures recall the disciples’ fear when they first saw him on the water and took him for a spirit (Matthew 14:26).

At the centre right, outside the boat, Peter, labelled PETRUS, has sunk to his waist in the waves. He is white-haired, as throughout the codex, and wears a violet mantle. He reaches up with both hands and lifts his face towards Christ. Christ, labelled IHC XPC, stands at the right edge of the picture on the surface of the water, his bare feet resting on the waves. He wears a white tunic and a blue mantle, the 1884 edition’s “blau (Christus)”, and has a gold cross-nimbus. He holds a book against his body with his left hand, while with his right he grasps Peter firmly by the wrist and bends his head towards him.

The miniature thus shows the moment of rescue described in Matthew 14:31,

extendens manum apprehendit eum.

As in the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (fol. 25r), and unlike the healings on fols. 21v and 22v, the painter represents a physical grasp exactly as the text describes it. The firm grip, the stability of Christ’s figure on the water, and Peter’s precarious position in the waves give visual form to the contrast between faith and doubt that closes the episode: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”

In the upper right corner, faintly drawn in white, a small head blows a stream of breath downwards towards Peter. The 1884 edition identifies these figures as wind gods, “Windgötter weiss”. As in the Calming of the Storm, the personified wind is a classical survival reduced to a small, almost sketchy head. Its placement is precise. It is the wind that Peter saw and that made him afraid, and the painter directs its breath at the figure of the sinking apostle.

The composition is clearly constructed. The boat, Peter and Christ form a sequence from left to right that also leads from danger to safety. Peter is placed in the gap between the boat he has left and the Christ he is trying to reach, and the joined hands at the right become the focal point of the image. The apostles’ upraised hands, Peter’s outstretched arms and Christ’s bending head converge on that point.

One detail qualifies the observation, made in earlier entries of this series, that Christ is beardless on the collaborators’ pages. On several of them he appears beardless, whereas on the Gregory Master’s pages (fols. 22r and 22v) he is bearded. Here, on a page not attributed to the Master, Christ appears with a short beard. The presence or absence of a beard is therefore not a consistent criterion for distinguishing the hands. It is better treated as a variation that may depend on models or circumstances not recoverable.

“Follow Me”: The Calling of Levi in the Codex Egberti, fol. 28v

The Calling of Levi occupies fol. 28v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Mark 2:14, with parallels in Matthew 9:9 and Luke 5:27: “And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and followed him.” The edition’s title, Berufung des Levi [Matthaeus], recalls that the tax collector called Levi in Mark and Luke is named Matthew in the first Gospel. The following miniature, on fol. 29r, shows Christ at table with his disciples in Levi’s house (Mark 2:15–17). The two scenes therefore face each other across an opening, the call on the left page and its consequence on the right. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The composition is divided into two parts. At the left, before a building with arched openings, a cornice and a gabled roof crowned by a crossed finial, sits the tax collector. The 1884 edition describes the building as greenish; in the image shown here it is pale grey and white. On the facade, above the arches, a gold inscription reads

TELONEARIUS, “the toll-collector”.

Placed on the building rather than over the man’s head, the label identifies him by his office instead of his name. It also marks the building itself as the telonium, the custom house at which he sits.

He is seated on a cushioned stool, the “red-yellow” seat of the 1884 description. He is bearded and dark-haired, wears a white tunic, a blue mantle and shoes, and sits before a violet table on which stands a golden balance. The 1884 edition specifically notes “Wage golden”, the golden scales. With one hand he holds the scales, the instrument of his trade. With the other he raises a finger and turns his head towards Christ. The gesture can be read as a response or a question, the moment in which he looks up from his work and is addressed. That it means the first movement of his assent is an interpretation, since the text says only that “he arose and followed him”, and in the image he has not yet risen.

At the right Christ approaches from the apostles’ side, labelled IHC XPC and marked by a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless with long hair and wears a white tunic and a violet pallium, the colour recorded in 1884. He holds a book against his body with his left hand. His body leans forward and his feet are set in a striding position, so that he seems to be passing by in motion, the cum praeteriret of Mark 2:14. He stretches out his right arm towards Levi and points at him with an extended finger.

The gesture carries the words

Sequere me,

the command and invitation that the whole scene illustrates.

Behind Christ stand two apostles, labelled APLI. One is white-haired and bearded in a red mantle, according to the codex’s convention for Peter. He raises an open hand. The other, dark-haired and bearded, in an ochre mantle, extends his hands as if in wonder. Their surprise may reflect the incredulity of the scribes and Pharisees that follows in the Gospel narrative, when Christ sits at table with “publicans and sinners”. It is not specified in the text of the call itself.

The composition depends on the interval between the two groups and on the long horizontal line of Christ’s arm, which bridges it. The building and the seated tax collector form a closed, static block at the left. The figures of Christ and the apostles at the right move into the empty space towards it. The contrast between the seated man surrounded by the instruments of his trade and the walking figures who come to call him gives visual form to the transformation the text narrates: the leaving of the telonium for discipleship.

The upper part of the field is pale and nearly empty. The 1884 edition describes the background as white-grey or reddish-white, with greenish-yellow ground. Faint lines of writing show through the parchment from the other side of the leaf, a common condition in the codex that should not be confused with an inscription. The figures have the elongated proportions and broad drapery planes characteristic of the collaborating painters, with gold highlights along the edges of the mantles and faces with large dark eyes. The narrative is clear and the gestures eloquent.

“They That Are Whole Have No Need of the Physician”: The Meal in Levi’s House in the Codex Egberti, fol. 29r

The Meal in Levi’s House occupies fol. 29r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It faces the Calling of Levi on fol. 28v, so that the call of the tax collector and the meal that follows it in his house are read together across a single opening. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Mark 2:15–17. As Christ sat at meat in Levi’s house, “many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples”. When the scribes and Pharisees saw it, they said to the disciples, “How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?” Christ answered: “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The painter represents the scene not as a banquet at a table but as a dialogue between two groups, with the meal itself reduced to a sign. At the left, before a building of ashlar masonry with a pediment and two small red-roofed houses or towers on its roof, the house of Levi, Christ sits on a cushioned bench. The 1884 edition describes the building as greenish-white. A small gold inscription above him reads IHC. He is nimbed, appears beardless with long dark hair, and wears a white tunic and a dark violet pallium, the “violett (Christus)” of the 1884 description. He holds a book on his knee and raises his right hand in the gesture of speech.

Beside him, on a long bench, sit three apostles, labelled APLI. The first is white-haired and bearded, in a dark blue mantle, the type the codex uses for Peter. The second is young and long-haired, in violet. The third is youthful and wears a red mantle. Across their laps lies a green cloth on which small objects, presumably food, are scattered. The second apostle raises his hand to his mouth as if eating. The meal is thus indicated by the shared cloth and the gesture of eating rather than by a table, a remarkable abbreviation that keeps the figures in an unbroken frieze. The 1884 edition lists the mantles from Christ onward as violet, blue, violet, red and violet.

At the right stand the scribes and Pharisees. The 1884 edition notes their red leggings and blue-black boots, the secular dress that distinguishes them in the codex from the barefoot Christ and apostles. Three heads are visible. The foremost, bearded, in a white tunic and dark violet cloak, stretches out his open hand towards the seated group. His gesture corresponds to their challenge in Mark 2:16, addressed not to Christ but to the disciples. Christ’s raised hand at the opposite end of the composition answers it, so that the whole scene becomes a single exchange: the objection of the Pharisees at the right, the reply of Christ at the left, with the disciples between them.

The publicans and sinners mentioned in the text are not explicitly distinguished from the apostles; only the label APLI is present. Whether one of the seated figures is meant as Levi himself cannot be determined from the image. The painter seems to have concentrated on the essential conflict of the passage, the meal shared by Christ and his followers, and the objection it provokes, rather than on the full cast of characters.

The composition is clearly balanced. The seated group at the left, with Christ raised slightly on his bench before the house, is set against the standing group of Pharisees at the right. An empty interval between them carries the exchange of words. The figures are drawn in the manner of the collaborating painters, with elongated proportions, broad areas of colour in the drapery, and faces with large dark eyes. The upper part of the field is pale and nearly empty, and faint lines of writing show through the parchment from the other side of the leaf, as on the facing page.

“Lord, That I May Receive My Sight”: The Healing of the Blind Man near Jericho in the Codex Egberti, fol. 31r

The Healing of the Blind Man near Jericho occupies fol. 31r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Luke 18:35–43. As Christ drew near to Jericho, “a certain blind man sat by the way side begging”. Hearing that Jesus of Nazareth was passing, he cried out for mercy. Christ commanded him to be brought, asked what he wanted, and on hearing “Lord, that I may receive my sight” replied: “Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee. And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, glorifying God.”

In the Roman lectionary Luke 18:31–43 is the Gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, the last Sunday before Lent. If the codex follows that order, the miniature marks the threshold between the Epiphany season and the Lenten readings. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The composition is built on two elements set at opposite ends of an open field: the blind man at the left, Christ and his apostles at the right. The ground is the reddish violet of the 1884 description, “röthlich-violett”, above a strip of green earth.

At the far left rises a large stylised tree, its trunk violet and its branches ending in fan-shaped clusters of red and white foliage and curling leaves. The 1884 edition records a violet tree with white-red branches. It is one of the most decorative elements in the cycle, closer to ornament than to observation of nature. In the narrative it serves to mark the roadside, the secus viam of Luke 18:35, where the blind man sits.

At the foot of the tree, labelled CAECUS, “the blind man”, sits the beggar. He is bearded and wears a blue-violet cloak. His eyes are covered with a white bandage bound around his head, a pictorial convention that makes his blindness immediately legible. A long staff leans against his shoulder, and his bare legs are drawn up beneath the cloak. He rests his cheek on one hand and stretches out the other, open, towards Christ: the beggar’s gesture, which here also becomes the gesture of petition,

Domine, ut videam.

At the right Christ approaches with the apostles, labelled IHC XPC and APLI. He is nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus and appears beardless with long hair. He wears a white tunic and a dark violet pallium and holds a book in his left hand. He leans slightly forward and stretches his right hand towards the blind man. His fingers reach into the empty space between them without touching. This is the gesture of the word that heals,

Respice, “Receive thy sight”.

Behind Christ stand three apostles. One raises an open hand in wonder, and the last is grey-haired and bearded in an ochre mantle, the codex’s type for Peter. The 1884 edition gives the remaining mantles as ochre.

The composition rests on the confrontation of the two outstretched hands across the open ground: the blind man’s raised in petition, Christ’s extended in answer. The figures are separated by an interval of empty space, as in other healing miracles of the cycle. The blind man is seated and low, while Christ and the apostles stand and advance. The difference of level marks the distance between the beggar on the ground and the one who comes to raise him. The large tree at the left gives the composition a vertical anchor and closes it at the edge, while the group of apostles closes it at the right.

The 1884 edition makes a small but noteworthy observation: the blind man and Christ wear the same blue-violet colour, whereas the apostles are in ochre. Whether this chromatic link between healer and healed was intended to carry meaning, or arose from the painter’s palette, cannot be determined. Within the composition, however, it ties the two protagonists together across the interval that separates them.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: tall, slightly elongated proportions, broad drapery planes with gold edges, and faces with large dark eyes. The narrative is nonetheless clear and concentrated, and the figure of the blind man, with his bandaged eyes, his staff and his patient outstretched hand, is among the most affecting in this part of the cycle.

“My House Shall Be Called the House of Prayer”: The Cleansing of the Temple in the Codex Egberti, fol. 34r

The Cleansing of the Temple occupies fol. 34r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Matthew 21:10–13, with parallels in Mark 11:15–17 and Luke 19:45–46. In Matthew, Christ entered the Temple, “and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves” (21:12–13).

In the Roman lectionary Matthew 21:10–17 is read on the Tuesday after the first Sunday of Lent. If the codex follows that order, the miniature stands among the first readings of Lent, after the Healing of the Blind Man on fol. 31r, which corresponds to Quinquagesima. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The composition is divided into three groups across a pale ground, the “weissroth” of the 1884 description. At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI. One is young, in a blue mantle. The other is white-haired, in a red mantle, in keeping with the type the codex uses for Peter. He clasps his hands before his chest. The 1884 edition gives these two mantles as blue and red.

At the centre Christ, labelled IHC, strides forward. He has a gold cross-nimbus, appears beardless, and wears a white tunic and a violet pallium, as recorded in 1884. He holds a book against his body with his left hand. With his right he raises above his head a bundle of cords or rushes, the scourge with which he drives out the traders.

The scourge is not mentioned in Matthew’s account, which the 1884 edition gives as the text of the reading. It comes from the Gospel of John, where Christ “made a scourge of small cords” (flagellum de funiculis, John 2:15). The painter thus enriches the Matthean scene with a detail from the Johannine narrative. This is a combination common in the iconography of the subject, and it makes Christ’s action immediately legible.

At the right rises the Temple, a long building of ashlar masonry with an upper storey pierced by arched windows, a red tiled roof crowned by a crossed finial, and arched doorways at its base. In front of it, three young traders in short tunics, red hose and blue-black boots (the colours recorded in 1884) recoil from Christ’s advance. They raise their hands in alarm and turn away. Above them stands the gold inscription COLYMBAE, a spelling of columbae, “doves”. It refers to the sellers of doves of Matthew 21:12.

At the far right, seated on a low stool before the Temple, sits a bearded man in a white tunic and violet cloak, with his hands drawn to his chest. A vertical gold inscription beside him, NUM-MU-LA-RI-US, identifies him as the moneychanger. The 1884 edition notes that his leggings are white rather than red, which distinguishes him from the dove-sellers. The overturning of his table, mensas nummulariorum evertit, is not shown explicitly. The moneychanger is presented seated and startled, as if caught in his place by Christ’s arrival.

The composition is driven by movement. Christ’s raised arm and striding posture give the central figure an energy unusual in a cycle dominated by calm gestures of speech and blessing. The traders’ recoil and raised hands answer that movement at the right. The apostles at the left, standing still with clasped hands, serve as witnesses. The Temple architecture fills the right half of the picture and provides both the setting and the object of Christ’s zeal.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: compact traders with lively, slightly angular movements, broad drapery planes in the apostles and Christ, and faces with large dark eyes. As on other pages of the codex, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale ground in the upper part of the picture.

“He Answered Her Not a Word”: Christ and the Canaanite Woman in the Codex Egberti, fol. 35v

The first miniature of Christ and the Canaanite Woman occupies fol. 35v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Matthew 15:21–28, with a parallel in Mark 7:24–30. It records that the following plate, on fol. 36r, is a continuation of the same scene. This is one of the few episodes in the cycle to which the painters devoted two images, placed on facing pages.

In the Roman lectionary the reading belongs to Lent; it is the Gospel of the Thursday after the first Sunday. The sequence fits the preceding miniatures. The Cleansing of the Temple on fol. 34r corresponds to the Tuesday of the same week. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Matthew’s account is one of the most dramatic in the Gospels. A woman of Canaan came out of the region of Tyre and Sidon and cried to Christ, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.” But he “answered her not a word”. His disciples besought him, saying, “Send her away; for she crieth after us.” He replied, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:22–24). Only after her further entreaty and her answer about the dogs eating the crumbs from their masters’ table does Christ grant her request (15:25–28). The miniature on fol. 35v illustrates the first part of this exchange.

The composition is built on separation. At the left, alone on the yellow-green ground under a pale violet-white sky (the 1884 edition’s “weissviolett” and “grüngelb”), the woman approaches. She is labelled CHANANEA in gold. She wears a white veil and robe beneath a dark violet mantle, the “violett” of the 1884 description, and bows forward, stretching out both hands in supplication. Her figure is isolated by a wide interval of empty ground that occupies nearly half the picture. That emptiness gives visual form to the silence of Christ’s first response and to the distance between the foreign woman and the group of Christ and his disciples.

At the right Christ stands among the apostles. Peter, labelled PETR, white-haired and bearded in a red mantle as recorded in 1884, turns towards Christ and raises his hands in a gesture of address. Another apostle, labelled AP(LI), young and dark-haired in an ochre mantle, also gestures. Their speaking hands correspond to the disciples’ intervention, “Send her away; for she crieth after us”.

Christ, labelled IHC XPC, is nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a violet mantle, holding a book against his body. He raises his right hand in the gesture of speech. His face and body are turned not towards the woman but towards the viewer and his disciples. The painter has rendered with great precision the moment in which Christ “answered her not a word” and addressed his reply to the disciples instead. His raised hand belongs to that reply,

Non sum missus nisi ad oves quae perierunt domus Israel.

The meaning of the composition depends on its relation to the facing page. On fol. 36r, according to the 1884 description and the catalogue title Erhörung der kananäischen Frau, “the granting of the Canaanite woman’s request”, the encounter is resolved. Read together, the two images trace the movement of the Gospel narrative from refusal to acceptance. The interval that separates the woman from Christ on the left page is closed on the right.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: tall figures with broad drapery planes edged with gold, and faces with large dark eyes. The figure of the Canaanite woman, bowed and alone with her outstretched hands, is drawn with particular expressiveness. As on several other pages of the codex, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale upper part of the picture.

“O Woman, Great Is Thy Faith”: The Granting of the Canaanite Woman’s Prayer in the Codex Egberti, fol. 36r

The second miniature of the Canaanite Woman occupies fol. 36r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It faces the first, on fol. 35v, so that the two images of a single Gospel episode are seen side by side when the book lies open. The catalogue of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg gives it the title Erhörung der kananäischen Frau, “the granting of the Canaanite woman’s request”. The 1884 plate edition describes it as the continuation of the scene on the preceding page. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The image illustrates the conclusion of Matthew 15:21–28. After Christ’s silence and his reply to the disciples, the woman “came and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me”. To his answer that “it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”, she replied: “Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Then Christ said to her: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour” (15:25–28).

The composition deliberately repeats the arrangement of the facing page, and the meaning of the pair lies in the differences between them. As on fol. 35v, the woman stands at the left and Christ with his apostles at the right, separated by a wide interval of ground under a pale, reddish-white sky above green-yellow earth (the 1884 edition’s “weissröthlich” and “grüngelb”). But each figure has changed its attitude.

The woman, labelled CHANANEA, no longer approaches standing. She has sunk to her knees and bows almost to the ground, stretching out her hands. She wears the same white veil and robe beneath a violet mantle, as recorded in 1884. Her posture corresponds to the Gospel’s adoravit eum, the act of worship that accompanies her renewed plea, Domine, adiuva me.

Christ, labelled IHC, nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a violet mantle, holding a book against his body. On the facing page he stood upright and turned towards his disciples. Here he turns to the woman, bends forward, and stretches his right arm out to her with an open hand. The gesture bridges much of the interval that separates them. It is the visual equivalent of his final words, fiat tibi sicut vis, the granting of her prayer. His gaze, which on fol. 35v avoided her, is now directed downwards at the kneeling figure.

Behind Christ stand two apostles. One is young and dark-haired in a red mantle. The other is white-haired and bearded in an ochre mantle, presumably Peter, according to the codex’s convention, and he holds his hands before his chest. The 1884 edition gives their mantles as red and ochre. They no longer intervene with speaking gestures, as on the facing page. They watch in silence as Christ addresses the woman.

Read together, the two pages form a small narrative diptych. The empty space that on fol. 35v expressed refusal is here crossed by Christ’s gesture. The change in the relationship between the figures carries the whole meaning of the Gospel episode: the faith that overcomes the initial refusal.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters. The bowed figure of the woman, rendered with economy and tenderness, is one of the most expressive in this section of the cycle. As on several other pages, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale upper part of the picture.

“Rise, Take Up Thy Bed, and Walk”: The Healing at the Pool of Bethesda in the Codex Egberti, fol. 36v

The Healing at the Pool of Bethesda occupies fol. 36v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 5:1–13. In the Roman lectionary John 5:1–15 is the Gospel of the Ember Friday of Lent. If the codex follows that order, the page completes a sequence of three consecutive Lenten weekdays: the Cleansing of the Temple (fol. 34r) on the Tuesday, the two miniatures of the Canaanite Woman (fols. 35v–36r) on the Thursday, and the paralytic at the pool on the Friday. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John’s narrative is set at the pool by the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, called Bethesda, where “lay a great multitude of impotent folk” waiting for the moving of the water. The Vulgate includes the verse explaining that “an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole” (John 5:4). Christ found there a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years and asked him whether he wished to be made whole. The man replied: “Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool” (hominem non habeo, 5:7). Christ said to him: “Rise, take up thy bed, and walk” (5:8).

The miniature combines two moments in a single field, set against a pale reddish-white ground above green-yellow earth, the 1884 edition’s “weissroth” and “grüngelb”. In the upper right corner, labelled PISCINA (only partly legible), the painter shows the pool as a rectangular basin of water seen in steep perspective. An angel, nimbed and winged, swoops down from the sky and plunges a long staff into the water, troubling it as John 5:4 describes. At the edge of the basin a bearded man in a dark mantle lowers a naked, emaciated sick person into the water. This is the healing at the pool as it ordinarily took place: the first to be put into the stirred water was cured.

The scene in the upper corner thus shows precisely what the paralytic below lacks. He has “no man” to put him into the pool. The painter places this subsidiary episode above and apart from the main scene, but it functions as a commentary on it. Healing by the troubled water depended on chance and on the help of others. The healing that follows depends on Christ’s word alone.

That main scene occupies the lower part of the picture. At the right the sick man lies on a long curved bed, green inside and violet outside, the colours recorded in 1884. He is bearded and half-naked, the lower part of his body covered with a white cloth, and he lifts himself slightly and stretches out his hand towards Christ. Christ stands at the centre, labelled IHC XPC, with a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a violet mantle, the “Obergewänder violett” of the 1884 description, and holds a book. He raises his right hand with two fingers extended in the gesture of speech. As in the Gospel account, he does not touch the sick man. The healing is accomplished entirely by the command

Surge, tolle grabatum tuum et ambula.

At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI. The foremost is white-haired and bearded in a dark mantle, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter, and raises both hands in a gesture of wonder.

The composition runs on a broad diagonal from the upper right, where the angel descends to the pool, down to the bed of the paralytic at the lower right, and across to Christ and the apostles at the left. The large empty area of pale ground in the upper left half of the picture separates the two episodes while allowing them to be read together. Whether the contrast between the two forms of healing was conceived as deliberate or simply as a narrative supplement drawn from the text cannot be determined, but the image presents it with great clarity.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: tall, slightly elongated proportions, broad drapery planes with gold edges, and faces with large dark eyes. The half-naked body of the paralytic and the naked figure being lowered into the pool give the painter an opportunity for anatomical modelling rarely found in this part of the cycle.

“Give Me to Drink”: Christ and the Woman of Samaria in the Codex Egberti, fol. 44v

The miniature of Christ and the Woman of Samaria occupies fol. 44v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies its text as John 4:4–40. In the Roman lectionary John 4:5–42 is the Gospel of the Friday after the third Sunday of Lent. If the codex follows that order, the miniature continues the series of Lenten readings illustrated in the preceding folios. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John’s narrative is one of the longest dialogues in the Gospels. Wearied by his journey, Christ sat by Jacob’s well near the Samaritan town of Sychar while his disciples went into the city to buy food. A woman of Samaria came to draw water, and he said to her, “Give me to drink.” The conversation that followed led from the water of the well to the “living water” that becomes “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (4:14), and to Christ’s revelation of himself as the Messiah. The disciples returned and “marvelled that he talked with the woman” (4:27).

The painter condenses this extended exchange into a single scene in three parts, set against a pale violet-white ground (the 1884 edition’s “violett-weisslich”).

At the centre Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, sits on a low mound of rock. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a violet mantle, the “violett (Christus)” of the 1884 description. His seated posture follows the text precisely:

Iesus ergo fatigatus ex itinere sedebat sic supra fontem (John 4:6).

He raises his right hand with two fingers extended in the gesture of speech, which carries the whole of the dialogue, from the first request for water to the discourse on the living water.

At the right, beside a cylindrical well of ashlar masonry filled with water (the 1884 edition gives the well as white-green and its interior as white), stands the woman, labelled SAMARITANA. She has long loose hair and wears a white tunic beneath a red outer garment with ornamental borders, the colours recorded in 1884. In her left hand she holds a bucket by its handle, the vessel with which she came to draw water. She stretches out her right hand towards Christ. Her gesture can be read as her response in the dialogue, perhaps her request “Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not” (4:15). Which moment of the conversation is intended cannot be determined.

At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI. They are the disciples returning from the city. The foremost, white-haired and bearded in a red mantle, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter, carries a round object wrapped in a white cloth. This is very probably the food that the disciples had gone to buy (ut cibos emerent, 4:8), which they then offer to Christ: “Master, eat” (4:31). Christ answered them that he had “meat to eat that ye know not of”. The other apostles crowd behind him, looking towards the scene at the well. Their presence corresponds to the disciples’ wonder that their master was speaking with a Samaritan woman.

The composition is built around the well, which stands between Christ and the woman as the material centre of their conversation. Christ, seated and slightly raised on his rock, forms the axis of the picture. The woman standing at the right and the group of apostles at the left frame him on either side. The bread carried by the apostles and the water of the well, food and drink, are set at the two ends of the composition. They correspond to the two strands of Christ’s teaching in this chapter: the living water he offers to the woman, and the food “that ye know not of” of which he speaks to the disciples. Whether this symmetry was conceived as an exegetical statement or arose from the narrative details of the text is a matter of interpretation, but the image places both elements clearly in view.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, and the slightly elongated proportions found throughout this part of the cycle. The figure of the Samaritan woman, with her loose hair, rich red garment and bucket, is one of the most individual female figures in the codex.

“Earth Accuses Earth”: Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery in the Codex Egberti, fol. 46v

The miniature of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery occupies fol. 46v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 8:1–11. In the Roman lectionary this passage is the Gospel of the Saturday after the third Sunday of Lent. If the codex follows that order, the miniature immediately follows the Samaritan Woman of fol. 44v, which belongs to the preceding Friday. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John recounts how the scribes and Pharisees brought to Christ a woman taken in adultery and asked him whether she should be stoned according to the Law of Moses. “But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.” When they continued to ask him, he said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” and again stooped down and wrote on the ground. “And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst” (John 8:6–9).

The miniature brings together the main elements of this narrative in a single composition, with the scene set before a building with a red roof and green doors, as the 1884 edition records. At the left, Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, sits on a cushioned seat raised on steps. He appears beardless, wears a white tunic and a violet mantle, the “violett (Christus)” of 1884, and holds a book against his body. He bends sharply forward and down, his head inclined, and with the index finger of his right hand writes on the ground at the foot of his seat. Behind him, at the left edge of the picture, an apostle labelled APLI, white-haired in a red mantle in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter, raises his hand.

The words that Christ writes are inscribed diagonally on the ground: TERRA TERRAM ACCUSAT, “earth accuses earth”. As the 1884 edition already pointed out, the Gospel does not say what Christ wrote. The inscription is an interpretation of the scene, the “sinnige Ausdeutung des biblischen Vorganges” in that edition’s words. The formula plays on the ground in which Christ writes and on the earthly, sinful nature shared by the accusers and the accused. It has a background in the exegetical tradition of the passage, but no precise patristic source is identified here. Its presence in the miniature shows that the image was conceived not simply as an illustration of the text but as a commentary on it.

At the centre, framed by the arched doorway of the building, stands the woman, labelled ADULTERA. She wears a long white gown with a red border, the “rothen Besatz am Kleide” noted by the 1884 edition, and her long hair is loose over her shoulders. She raises both hands with the palms turned outward, in a gesture that can be read as fear, supplication, or the defencelessness of the accused. Set within the doorway, isolated and frontal, she is literally “standing in the midst” of the composition, in medio stantem, as the Gospel says.

At the right, through a second door in the building, the accusers depart. The 1884 edition explains that “on the right the elders slip away” (Rechts entweichen die Seniores). Three men in white tunics with coloured hose and boots move out of the picture, one of them looking back over his shoulder. Their exit through the door corresponds to the Gospel’s

exibant unus post unum, incipientes a senioribus.

The last moment of the narrative, Christ alone with the woman, is thus already in preparation within the same image.

The composition is constructed with great clarity. The seated Christ, the standing woman and the departing elders are arranged from left to right in a sequence that also reads as a narrative progression: the writing on the ground, the woman left in the midst, the accusers withdrawing. The building with its two doors serves both as the setting, the Temple in which the scene takes place according to John 8:2, and as a device for distinguishing the woman, framed in one doorway, from the elders leaving through the other. The diagonal of Christ’s bending body leads the eye down to the inscription on the ground, which is the intellectual centre of the page.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The pronounced bend of Christ’s body, unusual in the codex, gives the scene a particular intensity.

“He Distributed to the Disciples”: The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the Codex Egberti, fol. 47v

The Feeding of the Five Thousand occupies fol. 47v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), as recorded in the photographic catalogue of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg; the 1884 plate edition, which gives “Fol. 47” without its usual mark for the verso, identifies the text as John 6:1–14. In the Roman lectionary this is the Gospel of the fourth Sunday of Lent, Laetare Sunday. If the codex follows that order, the miniature comes immediately after the Woman Taken in Adultery on fol. 46v, which belongs to the preceding Saturday. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John’s account tells how a great multitude followed Christ across the Sea of Galilee. Finding only “five barley loaves, and two small fishes” in the hands of a boy, Christ commanded the people to sit down on the grass, “and Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down” (John 6:10–11). The Vulgate reading, distribuit discumbentibus, speaks of Christ distributing to those seated, while the Synoptic accounts describe him giving the loaves to the disciples, who give them to the crowd. The miniature follows the latter pattern.

The composition is one of the most strictly symmetrical in the codex. Christ stands at the centre, frontal, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic beneath a dark violet mantle, the “violett” of the 1884 description. He stretches out both arms to either side, handing round loaves to two apostles who stand close beside him.

The apostles’ label is divided between them: APO above the left-hand figure and STOLI above the right. The apostle at the left is white-haired and bearded, in an ochre mantle, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter. The apostle at the right is dark-haired and bearded, in an orange-red mantle; the 1884 edition gives the remaining garments as “ocker oder röthlich”. Both receive the bread with hands covered by their mantles or by a white cloth, an ancient ceremonial gesture of reverence for sacred things.

On either side, filling the lower corners of the picture, sit the crowds, likewise labelled in two parts: TUR at the left and BAE at the right, turbae, “the multitudes”. They are rendered as tiers of heads, the foremost figures seated on the ground with their legs drawn up. They wear tunics of ochre and reddish tones and have youthful, uniform faces. Their seated posture corresponds to the Gospel’s command, Facite homines discumbere, “Make the men sit down”. No fish can be identified, and no baskets of fragments, the twelve baskets of John 6:13. The painter appears to have concentrated on the act of distribution itself.

The design deserves attention. The frontal Christ with outstretched arms, flanked symmetrically by two apostles and two crowds, transforms a narrative miracle into an image of ordered giving. The bread passes from Christ’s hands into the covered hands of the apostles and thence, implicitly, to the seated people. The hierarchy of the scene, Christ, apostles, crowd, is made visible in the arrangement of the figures and in the division of the labels across the page.

The eucharistic resonance of the subject was well established in the exegetical tradition, and the discourse on the bread of life follows in the same chapter of John (6:35, 6:51). That the painter intended a specific allusion to the distribution of communion is an interpretation rather than a documented fact. The frontality of Christ, the solemn symmetry and the veiled hands of the apostles nevertheless give the image a character closer to a ceremony than to an episode on a hillside.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, the heads of the crowd repeated with little variation. The economy of the design is nevertheless effective. A crowd of five thousand is suggested with a few dozen heads, and the miracle is concentrated in the single gesture of Christ’s outstretched hands.

“I Am the Light of the World”: The Healing of the Man Born Blind in the Codex Egberti, fol. 50r

The Healing of the Man Born Blind occupies fol. 50r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) and illustrates John 9:1–7. In the Roman lectionary John 9 is read on the Wednesday of the fourth week of Lent, a day tied to the preparation of the catechumens for baptism. If the codex follows that order, the miniature stands where its position would lead one to expect it, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand (fol. 47v), the Gospel of the fourth Sunday of Lent, and before the Raising of Lazarus (fol. 52v). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The painter reduces a long chapter, made largely of dialogue, to a single scene read from left to right, and joins two moments of it: the anointing of the eyes and the pool of Siloam to which the man is sent (John 9:6–7). The figures stand on a strip of green ground against a pale field, through which faint lines of the text on the other side of the leaf show, within the red frame with gold ornament used across the cycle.

At the left two apostles, labelled APLI, stand behind Christ. One is white-haired and wears a blue mantle, with a hand laid on his chest; the other, bearded and in a grey-green mantle, stands at the edge of the field with a hand raised. Their gestures may recall the disciples’ question, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). Christ, labelled IHS XPS, has a cruciform nimbus and wears a purple pallium over a white tunic. He holds a book in his left hand and raises two fingers of his right in the gesture of speech. The blind man, labelled CAECUS, wears a short red tunic and a white cloth about his head. He bends deeply at the waist, leans on a long staff and puts one hand to his eye. The image does not show the touch. As on other pages of the cycle, the Leper (fol. 21v) and Peter’s mother-in-law (fol. 22v) among them, the miracle is held in an exchange of gestures, and the man’s own hand at his eye stands for his blindness and for the clay of John 9:6.

The right third of the miniature is given to the pool. A peacock stands on a tall column of brick masonry and pours water from its beak into a large round basin, also of brick, the water drawn in blue-grey strokes. The inscription AQVEDVCTVS above the peacock names the conduit; a second label to its right is not securely legible. Siloam is thus shown as an engineered fountain rather than a spring. The peacock, an emblem of immortality in Early Christian art and a figure often set at fountains in baptismal imagery, makes the pool a figure of the font. Whether the painter took the motif from an older model cannot be established.

John himself glosses the name of the pool: “Siloe, which is interpreted, Sent” (John 9:7). The exegetical tradition of the passage read the washing in the pool as a figure of baptism, and the fountain of the miniature accords with that reading; that the designer intended it is an interpretation, not a documented fact. The central declaration of the chapter, “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5), is carried by Christ’s speaking hand directed at the darkened eye.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: firm dark contours, drapery in parallel folds with white highlights, and large dark-rimmed eyes. The colours are set against one another with deliberate contrast: the blues and violets of Christ and the apostles against the vermilion of the blind man’s tunic, which isolates him as the object of the miracle, and the grey masonry of column and basin.

“Lazarus, Come Forth”: The Raising of Lazarus in the Codex Egberti, fol. 52v

The Raising of Lazarus occupies fol. 52v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 11:1–45. In the Roman lectionary this long pericope is the Gospel of the Friday after the fourth Sunday of Lent. If the codex follows that order, the miniature continues the Lenten sequence after the Healing of the Man Born Blind on fol. 50r (Wednesday of the same week). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The Johannine narrative is the culmination of Christ’s signs in the fourth Gospel. Arriving at Bethany four days after Lazarus’s death, Christ is met by Martha and then by Mary, who “fell down at his feet”. At the tomb he commands, “Take ye away the stone”, and Martha protests: “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days” (iam foetet, 11:39). Then “he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin” (11:43–44). The miniature is set against a sky that the 1884 edition describes as violet above and red below, over green earth.

At the left stands Christ, labelled IHC XPC, nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a blue mantle, the “blau (Christus)” of 1884. He raises his right hand with two fingers extended: the gesture of command that carries the words Lazare, veni foras. Behind him stand the apostles, labelled APLI, the foremost white-haired in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter; the 1884 edition gives the apostle’s mantle as violet.

At Christ’s feet the two sisters of Lazarus are shown in the attitudes the Gospel ascribes to them. Mary, labelled MARIA in faint letters below the figure, lies prostrate on the ground in a green mantle, her long hair loose, and reaches out to clasp Christ’s feet. The 1884 edition notes that the label MARIA stands “under the figure clasping the feet of the Lord”. This is the cecidit ad pedes eius of John 11:32. Behind her Martha, labelled MARTHA and dressed in white, kneels and raises her hand towards Christ, either in supplication or in the protest about the stench of the tomb. The two sisters form a compact group whose diagonal leads the eye from Christ’s feet towards the tomb.

At the centre, in an open rectangular grave of grey stone, stands Lazarus, labelled LAZARUS. He is wrapped from head to foot in white graveclothes. The bands that bound his body are suggested by the folds of the wrapping, and his head is covered by the sudarium of John 11:44, which leaves his face visible. His eyes are open. He stands upright and motionless in the grave, isolated from all the other figures by the empty space around him. He is the silent object of the miracle and the visual centre of the composition.

At the right, labelled IUDEI, a group of Jews in white and blue garments with red hose has removed the slab that covered the tomb. Two of them hold it upright and lean it diagonally against the grave, carrying out Christ’s order, Tollite lapidem. The foremost presses a hand to his nose. The gesture is a traditional detail of the iconography of the Raising of Lazarus and gives visual form to Martha’s words, iam foetet. Other heads crowd behind, the witnesses of the miracle who, according to the Gospel, would believe in Christ as a result (11:45).

The composition is constructed with notable clarity. Christ’s commanding gesture at the left is answered by the upright figure of Lazarus at the centre. The diagonal of the tomb slab at the right and the diagonal of the prostrate sisters at the left frame the grave from both sides. Lazarus, rigid and white, stands out sharply against the rose and violet of the sky. The several moments of the narrative coexist without confusion: the sisters’ plea, the removal of the stone, the stench, the command, and the emergence of the dead man.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The page is among the most ambitious of the cycle. It brings together three distinct groups and the central figure of Lazarus in a balanced composition, and it retains the narrative details, the lifted stone and the covered nose, that the iconographic tradition of the subject had long established.

“She Wiped His Feet with Her Hair”: The Anointing at Bethany in the Codex Egberti, fol. 65r

The Anointing at Bethany occupies fol. 65r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies its text as John 12:1–9. In the Roman lectionary this passage is the Gospel of the Monday of Holy Week. If the codex follows that order, the miniature marks the beginning of the Passion cycle. There is a considerable gap in the sequence of images between the Raising of Lazarus on fol. 52v and this page. The readings of Passion Sunday and the days that follow are apparently not illustrated, a point that should be confirmed on the manuscript. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John relates that six days before the Passover Christ came to Bethany, “where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair”. Judas Iscariot objected, “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” Christ answered: “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (John 12:1–7). The miniature brings together the three elements of this scene: the anointing, the meal, and Judas’s objection.

At the centre Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, sits on a stepped seat furnished with green cushions. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a red-brown mantle, the “rothbraun” of the 1884 description. He raises his right hand in the gesture of speech. This is very probably his reply to Judas, Sinite illam. His left foot is extended over the steps of the seat.

At his feet, labelled MARIA in faint letters below the figure, kneels Mary of Bethany in a green mantle. She bows so low that her head almost touches Christ’s foot and wipes it with her long, loose hair. The painter has thus represented the second and most striking moment of her action, extersit pedes eius capillis suis. The vessel of ointment itself is not clearly identifiable.

Behind Mary stands Martha, labelled MARTHA. She is long-haired and dressed in white, the colour given in 1884, and holds a bowl in both hands. Her presence, standing and carrying a vessel, corresponds to the Gospel’s

et Martha ministrabat

Martha serves at the meal while her sister kneels at Christ’s feet. The contrast between the two sisters, the active and the contemplative, was a familiar theme of medieval exegesis, mainly in connection with Luke 10:38–42. Whether the painter intended to evoke it here is an interpretation, but the two figures are clearly set apart by posture and action.

At the right stands the table of the supper. It is semicircular and covered with a white cloth bordered in gold, from which a red drapery hangs to the ground in swags. It rests on legs ending in claw feet; the 1884 edition gives the tablecloth as red. Its form recalls the semicircular sigma table of Late Antique banquet imagery, which Early Christian art had used for scenes of meals. On it lie loaves marked with a cross, which the 1884 edition describes as light red and white, together with a goblet and a dish.

Behind the table sit three figures. The first, white-haired and bearded, holds a cup. The label APLI stands above the group. Because the Gospel mentions Lazarus at the table, this figure could also be read as Lazarus, but the inscription identifies the group simply as apostles, and the codex uses the white-haired type for Peter. At the far right, labelled IUDAS, sits a young man in a red mantle who raises his hands in a gesture of protest. This is Judas’s objection to the waste of the costly ointment. The figure between them, in green, also raises a hand. The 1884 edition gives the apostles’ mantles as red-brown, green and red.

The composition is divided into two halves. At the left, Christ enthroned with the two sisters forms a vertical group centred on the act of devotion at his feet. At the right, the table with the apostles and Judas forms a horizontal group centred on the meal and the protest. Christ’s raised hand, turned towards the right, links the two parts and corresponds to the dialogue the text records. His reply defends Mary’s action against Judas’s complaint and interprets it as a preparation for his burial. The image thus places at the threshold of the Passion both the devotion of Mary and the first sign of Judas’s betrayal.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The table with its swagged drapery, claw feet and objects is one of the most elaborate pieces of furniture in the codex.

“Hosanna: Blessed Is He That Cometh”: The Entry into Jerusalem in the Codex Egberti, fol. 66r

The Entry into Jerusalem occupies fol. 66r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), on the leaf immediately following the Anointing at Bethany (fol. 65r). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 12:12–16, the passage that follows directly on the anointing in the fourth Gospel. In the Roman tradition the Entry was read in the Matthean version (Matthew 21:1–9) at the Palm Sunday procession. The Johannine account here continues the reading of John 12 begun on the preceding page. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John’s account is brief: “On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon” (John 12:12–14). The miniature follows this text but enriches it with details found only in the Synoptic Gospels: the cutting of branches from the trees and the spreading of garments on the road (Matthew 21:8; Mark 11:8). These were part of the established iconography of the subject. The same procedure appears elsewhere in the codex, for example in the Johannine scourge of the Matthean Cleansing of the Temple on fol. 34r.

At the left the apostles, labelled APLI, follow Christ. The foremost is white-haired and bearded in a red mantle over a white tunic, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter, and holds a book; another wears blue. The 1884 edition gives their mantles as blue and red.

At the centre Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, rides sideways on a grey ass, the colour recorded in 1884. He appears beardless and wears a white tunic and a red-brown mantle, the “rothbraun (Christus)” of 1884. As the facsimile description notes, he holds a book in his left hand and raises his right in a gesture of blessing. The ass advances with lowered head towards a youth who holds out a leafy branch before it. At its feet lie the garments thrown on the road, green, blue and red according to the 1884 edition. A young man bends to spread a blue-violet cloak directly in front of the animal.

At the right, beneath the label IUDEI, a crowd comes out to meet Christ. Its members are young and beardless, dressed in white tunics with decorated borders and in red and red-brown mantles. They stretch out their hands towards Christ, and the foremost spread their garments before him. Behind them rises a grey tree with slender leafy branches, the 1884 edition’s “Baum grau”. A youth in green has climbed into it and is breaking off a branch, the caedebant ramos de arboribus of Matthew 21:8.

The youthfulness of the crowd is a notable feature. It may reflect the liturgical tradition of the pueri Hebraeorum, the children of the Hebrews who, according to the antiphons of the Palm Sunday procession, went out to meet Christ carrying branches and spreading their garments. Whether the painter intended this allusion is a matter of interpretation. The label on the page names the crowd simply as IUDEI, “the Jews”, the people come to the feast of John 12:12.

The composition is organised as a procession from left to right. The apostles follow Christ, Christ advances on the ass, and the crowd at the right comes to meet him. The two movements converge at the centre-right, where the ass lowers its head towards the branch and the garments are spread beneath its feet. The tree at the right edge closes the composition and provides a vertical counterweight to the group of apostles at the left. The stream of garments on the ground, in three different colours, leads the eye along the path of the procession.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The decorated borders of the young men’s tunics and the lively figure climbing the tree give the scene a festive animation appropriate to its subject. As on other pages, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale upper part of the picture.

“Lord, Dost Thou Wash My Feet?”: The Washing of the Feet in the Codex Egberti, fol. 78r

The Washing of the Feet occupies fol. 78r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 13:1–14. In the Roman lectionary John 13:1–15 is the Gospel of Maundy Thursday, the Mass in Cena Domini. The miniature thus opens the Passion narrative proper, which in the codex follows the Anointing at Bethany (fol. 65r) and the Entry into Jerusalem (fol. 66r). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John relates that at supper Christ “riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet”. When he came to Simon Peter, Peter said, “Lord, dost thou wash my feet?” and then, “Thou shalt never wash my feet.” Christ answered, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me”, and Peter replied, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head” (John 13:4–9).

The miniature does not show the physical act of washing but the dialogue between Christ and Peter. It sets this dialogue in an unusually tall, almost square field.

The scene takes place beneath an architectural setting of four columns with cushion-like capitals. They carry an entablature of ashlar masonry with a dentilled cornice, a portico or open hall that suggests the room of the supper. The 1884 edition describes the building as white-grey and the sky as rose. The columns divide the field into bays without enclosing the figures, which stand in front of them on a narrow strip of ground.

At the left, labelled PETR, Peter sits on a red seat. He is white-haired and bearded and wears a white tunic beneath a blue mantle, the “blau (Petrus)” of the 1884 description. His right foot rests in a round basin of water at the foot of the seat. He stretches out both hands towards Christ in an emphatic gesture. It can be read as his protest,

Domine, tu mihi lavas pedes?,

or as his final plea that Christ should wash “also my hands and my head”. The painter does not specify which moment is intended; the gesture conveys Peter’s agitation in the exchange as a whole. Behind him stand other apostles, labelled APLI, one of them in a red mantle, also as recorded in 1884. One raises his hands in prayer.

Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, stands to the right of centre. He appears beardless and wears a pale tunic beneath a violet mantle; in the 1884 edition the colour is “violett (Christus)”. A light cloth hanging at his waist may represent the towel with which he girded himself (praecinxit se). He does not bend over Peter’s feet but stands upright, facing him, and raises his right hand in the gesture of speech.

At the far right a young apostle in a pale tunic and green mantle, the “grün” of 1884, stands with one foot raised on a low block and bends to take hold of it. He appears to be removing his sandal in preparation for having his feet washed. The motif of an apostle undoing his footwear while waiting his turn is found in the wider iconographic tradition of the subject. Here it gives the scene a sense of sequence: Peter is being addressed, and the others wait.

The composition places Peter and Christ facing each other across a central bay of the colonnade, with the basin of water between and below them. The architecture lends dignity and order to the scene and isolates the dialogue between the two principal figures. The tall format, rare in the cycle, allows the colonnade to rise high above the figures and creates a solemn interior space appropriate to the institution of the act that Christ presents as an example: “For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you” (John 13:15).

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. As on several other pages, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale upper part of the picture.

“Whom Seek Ye?”: The Betrayal and Arrest of Christ in the Codex Egberti, fol. 79v

The Betrayal and Arrest of Christ occupies fol. 79v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 18:1–12, with parallels in Matthew 26:47, Mark 14:43 and Luke 22:47. In the Roman liturgy the Passion according to John (John 18:1–19:42) is read on Good Friday. In the codex this long reading is accompanied by a sequence of miniatures that follow the Johannine narrative through the arrest, the trial, the Crucifixion and the Entombment. This page is the first of that series. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John’s account sets the scene in a garden across the Kidron, where Judas came “having received a band of men and officers from the chief priests and Pharisees” with “lanterns and torches and weapons”. When Christ identified himself, they “went backward, and fell to the ground”. Then “Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus.” Finally “the band and the captain and officers of the Jews took Jesus, and bound him” (John 18:1–12).

The miniature combines this narrative with the kiss of Judas, which John does not mention but which the Synoptic Gospels make the sign of the betrayal (Matthew 26:48–49; Mark 14:44–45; Luke 22:47–48). As on other pages of the codex, the image draws on several Gospels at once and keeps the episode that had become central to its iconography.

The setting is the garden of John 18:1, indicated by two tall stylised trees with branching leafy shoots. The 1884 edition describes them as grey-white. They rise against a rose sky above a strip of green ground, the colours recorded in 1884. Beneath them a crowded scene unfolds across the whole width of the picture.

At the centre Christ, nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus and wearing a violet mantle, the “violett (Christus)” of 1884, stands motionless while Judas embraces him and presses his face against his. Judas wears a white tunic and a broad red mantle, the “roth (Judas)” that the 1884 edition singles out. He wraps one arm around Christ’s shoulder in the gesture of the kiss. Christ’s face, turned slightly towards the viewer, remains calm.

From both sides hands reach out to seize him. At the left a man in a white tunic stretches out his arms. At the right a group of soldiers and officers in white, green and red garments extends their hands towards Christ’s shoulders. Above their heads rise wooden staves or torches, the laternae et faces et arma of John 18:3. The convergence of so many arms on the single still figure of Christ gives visual form to the comprehenderunt Iesum of John 18:12.

At the lower left the episode of Peter and Malchus is shown in the foreground. Peter, white-haired and bearded in a dark blue mantle, in keeping with the codex’s type for him, raises a sword above his head. At his feet a young man in red has fallen to the ground and lifts his hand towards his head. This is Malchus, the high priest’s servant, whose ear Peter cuts off. John alone among the evangelists names both Peter and Malchus. Behind Peter stand other apostles, one in a violet mantle.

The 1884 edition lists the outer garments in sequence as red, violet, blue, red, red, white, brown, violet (Christ) and red (Judas).

The composition is dense and dramatic, unlike the calmer, more open scenes of the earlier part of the cycle. The figures overlap in tight groups, the gestures converge on the centre, and the raised sword of Peter and the staves of the soldiers introduce sharp diagonals into the picture. Christ, motionless and frontal at the centre, embraced by Judas and seized from both sides, is the still point around which the violence of the scene revolves. The contrast between his calm and the agitation of the figures around him gives visual form to the Johannine portrayal of the arrest, in which Christ goes willingly to meet those who have come to take him.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The overlapping groups, with heads stacked one behind another, convey the impression of a crowd within a limited space.

Annas, Peter’s Denial and the Flagellation: The Three-Register Passion Page of the Codex Egberti, fol. 80v

Fol. 80v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) is unique within the manuscript’s cycle. Instead of a single scene, it presents three episodes of the Passion according to John in three superimposed registers. Each is accompanied by a short explanatory text written in gold on a dark purple band. The codicological description prepared for the 2005 facsimile singles out this page as the one instance in the codex in which such additional inscriptions explain the scenes following the arrest of Christ. The 1884 plate edition identifies the three episodes as Christ before Annas (John 18:13), the denial of Peter (John 18:16–18), and the flagellation (John 19:1).

The page belongs to the sequence of miniatures accompanying the Johannine Passion read on Good Friday. It follows the Betrayal on fol. 79v. The page is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The first register: Christ before Annas.

The band at the top bears the inscription transcribed in 1884 as

ANNAS QUEM DAMNAT, “Annas, whom he condemns”, or “whom Annas condemns”,

depending on how the fragment is construed. Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed in gold, wears a violet mantle, the colour recorded in 1884. He is led towards the right by men who hold his arms, in accordance with John 18:12–13: “they bound him, and led him away to Annas first”.

Annas, labelled ANNAS, sits on a red-yellow throne with green cushions, the “Sitz des Annas rothgelb” of 1884, and is also dressed in violet. With both hands he pulls open the neck of his garment. The gesture recalls the rending of clothes with which, in the Synoptic Gospels, the high priest Caiaphas reacts to Christ’s words (Matthew 26:65). The painter appears to have transferred it to Annas. This is an interpretation of the gesture, as no Gospel ascribes it to him.

At the far left, beside a masonry wall or tower, stands a white-haired man in a blue mantle, Peter by the codex’s convention and by the 1884 description. He raises his hands. His position at the edge of the scene corresponds to John 18:16: “Peter stood at the door without.”

The second register: the denial of Peter.

The band reads

PETRUS HIC NEGAT, “here Peter denies”.

The 1884 edition notes that the band continues with an ornament or illegible letters, perhaps Iesum or Dominum. Peter, white-haired and in his blue mantle, is seated and raises his open hands in a gesture of refusal.

Facing him is the doorkeeper, labelled HO-STIARIA, the ancilla ostiaria of John 18:17. She wears a white veil and a green garment, the colour given in 1884, and raises her hand to her chin as she addresses him: “Art not thou also one of this man’s disciples? He saith, I am not.”

At the right, on a grey tower crowned by a red domed roof, stands a cock, the bird that crows after the third denial (John 18:27). The 1884 edition describes it as violet. The cock is placed at a distance from the figures, above the scene of the flagellation in the register below. Its presence marks the completion of Peter’s betrayal while the narrative continues.

The third register: the flagellation.

The band reads

ISTE FLAGELLATUR, “this man is scourged”.

At the left stands Pilate, labelled PILATUS, in a white tunic and dark cloak. He raises his index finger in a gesture of command, the apprehendit Pilatus Iesum et flagellavit of John 19:1.

At the right Christ, nimbed and wearing a long blue tunic (“blau (Jesus)” in the 1884 description), is bound against a tower or column of masonry with an arched opening. A servant in a white tunic with green hose grips his arms to hold him against it. A second servant in a green tunic raises a rod to strike. The 1884 edition notes the white and green hose of the servants. The masonry structure serves as the column of the flagellation, and it is the same tower on which the cock stands in the register above. The painter thus links the two episodes in a single architectural element.

The three registers are separated by undulating bands of green ground and by the horizontal inscription bands, but they are not entirely self-contained. The architectural elements cross the divisions, the tower at the left of the first register and the tower of the flagellation rising into the register of the denial. The eye can therefore read the page from top to bottom as a continuous sequence: the interrogation, the denial, the scourging.

The brief inscriptions function as tituli, making explicit the subject of each scene in the manner of an epigraphic programme, a practice that may reflect the conventions of monumental painting, where such texts were common. That this particular page was modelled on a mural programme is a hypothesis and not a documented fact.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: compact proportions in this reduced format, broad drapery planes, and faces with large dark eyes. The colours agree throughout with the 1884 description: rose sky, green ground, violet for Christ and Annas, blue for Peter, green for the doorkeeper and one of the servants.

“Hail, King of the Jews”: The Mocking of Christ before Pilate in the Codex Egberti, fol. 82r

The miniature on fol. 82r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) continues the illustration of the Passion according to John read on Good Friday. The 1884 plate edition titles it Verspottung des Herrn, the Mocking of Christ, and gives the text as John 19:2. It is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The Johannine narrative of these verses is compressed. After the scourging, “the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, and said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands. Pilate therefore went forth again”, and “Jesus came forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man! When the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out, saying, Crucify him, crucify him” (John 19:2–6). The miniature brings together the mock homage of the soldiers, the presentation of Christ by Pilate, and the reaction of the chief priests in a single composition. All of these are present in the text immediately following the verse the 1884 edition cites.

The scene is set against a pale rose ground, the “Himmel rosa” of the 1884 description, above a strip of green earth, without architecture. At the left Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed in gold, stands frontally and barefoot. He wears a blue tunic and a red-brown mantle, the colours recorded in 1884. The mantle may be intended as the vestis purpurea, the purple robe put on him in mockery, although red-brown is also the colour of Christ’s mantle on other pages of the codex (fols. 65r and 66r), and the identification therefore remains uncertain. No crown of thorns is distinguishable. Christ’s face is calm, and he looks out of the picture rather than at his tormentors.

Beside him stands Pilate, labelled PILATUS. He is bearded and wears a white tunic beneath a red mantle, the colours given in 1884. He holds Christ by the hand and turns towards the group at the right, gesturing towards them with his other hand. The pairing of the two figures, Pilate holding Christ and presenting him to those gathered before him, corresponds to the moment of John 19:4–5, when Pilate brings Christ out and says Ecce homo. Whether the painter intended to illustrate this moment specifically or the episode of mockery as a whole cannot be determined. The composition clearly presents Christ as the object of display.

At the right two groups face them. In front, labelled MILITES, the soldiers in green and blue garments, as the 1884 edition records, bend forward and stretch out their open hands towards Christ. Their gesture parodies the proskynesis offered to a ruler. It is the soldiers’ mock homage, Ave, rex Iudaeorum, of John 19:3. Behind them stand the chief priests, labelled PONTIFICES, in red mantles (“die Pontifices rothe Mäntel” in 1884). The foremost raises his index finger in a gesture of accusation that corresponds to their cry of Crucifige.

The composition is built on a strong contrast between the two halves of the picture. At the left Christ and Pilate stand upright, still and isolated, the empty space around them emphasising their presence. At the right the soldiers and priests form a crowded group of bent bodies, outstretched hands and pointing fingers. The mock reverence of the soldiers and the accusing gesture of the priests together express the hostility of the crowd. Christ’s frontal, motionless figure stands as a silent counterpoint to it. The juxtaposition gives visual form to the irony at the heart of the Johannine Passion, in which the mock title “King of the Jews” proclaims a truth that the speakers do not recognise.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. As on several other pages, the horizontal ruling of the parchment is visible through the pale ground.

“Whence Art Thou?”: Christ before Pilate in the Codex Egberti, fol. 82v

The miniature of Christ before Pilate occupies fol. 82v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), on the back of the leaf that carries the Mocking of Christ. The photographic catalogue of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg records it as Verhör Jesu durch Pilatus, the interrogation of Jesus by Pilate. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 19:9–11. The page belongs to the sequence of miniatures accompanying the Johannine Passion read on Good Friday. It is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The verses illustrated record the last exchange between Pilate and Christ in John’s Gospel. After the chief priests declared that Christ “made himself the Son of God”, Pilate “was the more afraid; and went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus, Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer. Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee? Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:8–11).

The composition is among the most sparing in the cycle, after the crowded scenes of the preceding pages. Against a pale rose ground, the “Himmel rosa” of the 1884 description, with the ruling of the parchment visible, two figures face each other on a strip of green earth. A building closes the scene at the right.

At the left Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed in gold, stands frontally and barefoot. He wears a long tunic and a mantle wrapped closely around his body. The 1884 edition gives the tunic as blue and the mantle as red-brown; in the image shown here both appear dark blue. He holds his right hand before his chest with two fingers extended in the gesture of speech. That gesture corresponds to his reply,

Non haberes potestatem adversum me ullam, nisi tibi datum esset desuper.

His upright, enclosed figure and his calm face give him a dignity that contrasts with his situation as the accused.

At the centre stands Pilate, labelled PILATUS. He is bearded and dark-haired and wears a white tunic beneath a red mantle, the colours recorded in 1884, with shoes on his feet. He faces Christ and raises his right index finger, while his left hand is held open at his side. The pointed finger can be read as the gesture of his questioning, Unde es tu?, or of his assertion of power, potestatem habeo crucifigere te. The image does not settle which moment is meant; it presents the exchange as a whole.

At the right stands a tall building of grey ashlar masonry, the colour given in 1884. It has an upper storey pierced by small arched windows and twin gabled roofs crowned with crossed finials. It represents the praetorium, the judgment hall into which Pilate had re-entered (ingressus est praetorium iterum, 19:9). Its massive, closed form at the edge of the picture gives the place of judgment a solid presence, while the two figures stand outside it in the open space.

The meaning of the composition lies in the confrontation of the two figures across a narrow interval. Pilate, the representative of earthly power, questions and asserts. Christ answers with a gesture that refers to a power “from above”. The reduction of the scene to two figures and a building, without soldiers, priests or crowd, focuses attention on this dialogue. It gives visual form to the theological centre of the Johannine trial narrative: the question of authority and of who truly judges whom.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The difference between the barefoot Christ in his long robes and the shod Pilate in his tunic and mantle repeats the codex’s consistent distinction between sacred and secular figures.

The Way to Calvary and the Crucifixion: The Full-Page Passion Picture of the Codex Egberti, fol. 83v

Fol. 83v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) is a full-page picture divided into two registers. It is the central image of the Passion sequence of the manuscript. The 1884 plate edition describes the upper register as Christ led to Calvary, with Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross (Matthew 27:32, with parallels in Mark, Luke and John). It describes the lower register as the Crucifixion, the division of Christ’s garments, and Christ’s thirst (Matthew 27:35–48 and parallels).

The citations show that, although the page belongs to the sequence that otherwise follows the Gospel of John, its imagery draws on all four Gospels. Simon of Cyrene and the darkening of the heavens are Synoptic. The division of the garments and the sponge are in John as well. The page is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

The upper register: the way to Calvary.

On a pale rose ground over green earth, the colours recorded in 1884, Christ is led to the right by soldiers. He is labelled IHC XPC on a dark band, nimbed in gold, and barefoot. He wears a blue tunic and a red-brown mantle, as the 1884 edition records. One soldier in a green tunic and red hose holds his arm; others in white walk beside him. Ahead of them strides Simon of Cyrene, labelled SYMON, in a red garment. He carries a gold cross over his shoulder and bends forward under its weight. The scene follows the Synoptic account, in which Simon was “compelled to bear his cross” (Matthew 27:32), rather than John, in which Christ goes forth “bearing his cross” himself (John 19:17).

The lower register: the Crucifixion.

The lower register is separated from the upper by a wavy band. In its sky appear two personifications labelled SOL and LUNA. The sun is a bust in red with a radiant crown, the moon a bust in white, half-veiled, as the 1884 edition records. Their presence recalls the darkness that covered the land at Christ’s death (Matthew 27:45) and belongs to a long iconographic tradition of the Crucifixion.

At the centre Christ hangs on a large gold cross outlined in red. He wears a long blue tunic reaching to his ankles, the colobium, and his eyes are open. The 1884 edition draws attention to these open eyes. It contrasts them with the following plate (fol. 84v), where Christ’s head is bowed in death, and notes the nailing of hands and feet with single nails, the absence of a footrest and the absence of a crown of thorns. The type of the crucified Christ clothed in a long tunic and shown alive is attested from the sixth century, the best-known early example being the Rabbula Gospels⁷ of 586. Its use here presents Christ on the cross as living and victorious rather than as a dead body.

On either side hang the two thieves on yellow, T-shaped crosses, dressed in white. They are labelled DISMAS at the left and GESMAS at the right; the 1884 edition gives CESMAS or GESMAS for the second. These names do not appear in the canonical Gospels. They derive from the apocryphal tradition, the Gospel of Nicodemus, and were widespread in the Latin West.

At the foot of the cross two soldiers sit on the ground and hold between them a dark garment edged with gold. This is Christ’s seamless tunic, for which they cast lots instead of dividing it (John 19:23–24). The 1884 edition mentions the dice and the gold hems.

To the right of the cross a man in a red tunic raises a long reed with a sponge towards Christ. He is labelled STEPHATON, the name that medieval tradition gave to the sponge-bearer of John 19:29 and Matthew 27:48. The 1884 edition devotes a note to this inscription. It records that at the time only three other examples of the name were known: a carved wooden panel in the Louvre, a twelfth-century painting at Saint-Rémy-la-Varenne, and an eleventh-century wall painting in S. Urbano alla Caffarella near Rome, where the figure is called Calpurnius. It also reports the conjecture of Charles Clermont-Ganneau that the name arose from a misunderstanding of a Greek word, in the same way that the names of the two thieves have been explained.

At the far left stands the Virgin, nimbed, veiled, in a dark mantle dotted with gold, the brown-red or dark violet of the 1884 description. She raises her hand to her face in a gesture of grief, with another veiled woman behind her. At the far right stands John, nimbed, in a white tunic and a dark violet mantle, the colour recorded in 1884, likewise raising his hand to his cheek. They correspond to the mother and the beloved disciple standing by the cross in John 19:25–27.

The page is among the most carefully composed of the codex. The two registers are clearly separated but linked by the cross that Simon carries in the upper scene and that stands at the centre of the lower one. The lower register is strictly symmetrical: the central gold cross flanked by the two lesser crosses, the sun and moon above them, the Virgin and John at the outer edges, and the soldiers with the garment and the sponge-bearer around the foot of the cross. The density of inscribed names makes the page a compendium of the Passion narrative in its fullest medieval form, combining canonical Gospels and apocryphal tradition. The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters, with gold edges on the drapery and faces with large dark eyes.

“In the Garden a New Sepulchre”: The Deposition and Entombment in the Codex Egberti, fol. 85v

The Deposition and Entombment occupy a full page, fol. 85v, of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The page is divided into two registers. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 19:38–42, with the parallel in Matthew 27:57–61. The verses form the close of the Johannine Passion read on Good Friday, and the page concludes the sequence of Passion miniatures that began with the Betrayal on fol. 79v. It is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John tells how Joseph of Arimathaea, “being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews”, asked Pilate for the body. “And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices… Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus” (John 19:38–42). The two registers of the page follow these two moments: the taking down from the cross and the laying in the tomb.

The upper register: the Deposition.

At the centre rises the cross, gold with a red border, as the 1884 edition records. It stands on a pale, cloud-like mound against a rose sky over green earth. Joseph of Arimathaea, labelled IOSEPH and dressed in red, stands at the left. He has received Christ’s body over his shoulder and supports it with both arms. Christ, nimbed, his eyes closed and his head hanging, is still dressed in the long blue tunic of the Crucifixion pages; the 1884 edition gives “Tunica des Herrn blau”. His arm hangs limp down Joseph’s back.

At the right Nicodemus, labelled NICODEMUS and dressed in white, bends towards the foot of the cross. With a tool, apparently a pair of pincers, he draws the nail from Christ’s feet. The detail of the extraction of the nails, which the Gospels do not mention, gives the scene a concrete, almost procedural character. The composition is strictly symmetrical around the cross, with Joseph and Nicodemus framing it on either side.

The lower register: the Entombment.

The upper register ends in the white mound, and below it the scene changes to the garden, labelled HORTUS in gold at the centre of the field. Two tall grey trees with stylised branches stand at either side, the “Bäume grau” of 1884. They give the garden of John 19:41 a visual form. Between them stands an open rectangular sarcophagus of green stone with gilded edges.

The two disciples, now named together in a single inscription as NICODEMUS ⁊ IOSEPH (the sign between the names is the Tironian note for et), lower the body into it. Nicodemus, at the left, holds the head and wears a pale bluish garment; the 1884 edition gives blue. Joseph, at the right, holds the feet and wears red, as before. Christ’s body, nimbed in gold, is now wrapped in a violet garment, which the 1884 edition records as “violett”. The change from the blue tunic of the upper register may be intended to show the body wound “in linen clothes with the spices” (linteis cum aromatibus, 19:40). That is an interpretation, and the colour alone does not establish it.

The two registers form a coherent sequence. The disciples are the same in both, identified by name and by their consistent garments, Joseph in red throughout and Nicodemus in white or pale blue. The body passes from the cross above to the tomb below, and the vertical of the cross in the upper register is answered by the horizontal of the sarcophagus in the lower. The pale mound that separates the two scenes functions both as the hill of Golgotha and as a transition to the garden. In this way it unites the two places that John’s Gospel describes as adjacent: “in the place where he was crucified there was a garden”.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The page is notable for its spacious, uncrowded design, in which two figures and a body are enough to carry each scene. It gives the close of the Passion a quiet solemnity, in contrast with the crowded violence of the Arrest and the Crucifixion. As on several other pages, the horizontal ruling of the parchment is visible through the pale ground.

“He Is Risen; He Is Not Here”: The Women at the Tomb in the Codex Egberti, fol. 86v

The Women at the Tomb occupies fol. 86v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is the first image after the Passion sequence that closes with the Deposition and Entombment on fol. 85v. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Mark 16:1–7, with parallels in Matthew 28:1 and Luke 24:1. In the Roman lectionary Mark 16:1–7 is the Gospel of Easter Sunday. The miniature therefore marks the passage in the codex from the Passion to the Resurrection, the turning point of the liturgical year. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Mark relates that when the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome “had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him”. Entering the sepulchre, “they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him” (Mark 16:1–6).

The miniature reduces the scene to two groups facing each other across an open field. Following the Byzantine and Western tradition of the subject, the Resurrection itself is not shown. It is announced.

At the left stand the three women, labelled MULIERES, the number given by Mark. All three are nimbed in gold, a mark of honour that the codex here gives to the holy women. They are veiled and wear tunics of red and white with outer garments of white, green and violet, as the 1884 edition records. The foremost carries a round vessel and stretches out her other hand; the others hold vessels as well. These are the containers of the spices with which they came to anoint the body. The women stand close together, their heads slightly inclined, in an attitude of hesitation and attentiveness that suits the Gospel’s

et obstupuerunt, “they were affrighted”.

At the right the angel, labelled ANGELUS D(OMI)NI, “the angel of the Lord”, sits on a large green slab drawn in steep perspective, the “Grab grün” of the 1884 description. He is nimbed in gold, has large yellow wings, and wears a white tunic and a green-yellow mantle, all colours recorded in 1884. He holds a long staff in his left hand and raises his right towards the women in the gesture of speech that carries his announcement,

Surrexit, non est hic.

The angel’s seated position follows Mark, who describes a young man “sitting on the right side”. At the same time the slab on which he sits recalls Matthew’s account, in which the angel rolled back the stone from the door of the sepulchre “and sat upon it” (Matthew 28:2). The painter thus combines the two Gospels in one image, as he does elsewhere in the cycle. Whether the green slab is meant as the stone or as the tomb itself, the 1884 edition’s “Grab”, cannot be decided from the image alone. In either case the empty tomb is not shown as an architectural structure. It is suggested only by this single, tilted plane on which the messenger of the Resurrection is enthroned.

The composition is simple and clear. The two groups are separated by a broad interval of empty ground, across which the angel’s gesture and words pass, as in many of the dialogue scenes of the codex. The three closely grouped standing women at the left are balanced by the single seated angel at the right, whose spread wings and diagonal staff give him a commanding presence. The pale ground, rose in the 1884 description, and the absence of any architecture give the scene an almost abstract stillness.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The yellow wings of the angel, rendered with broad strokes of colour, are among the most luminous passages in this part of the codex.

“Known of Them in Breaking of Bread”: The Road to Emmaus and the Supper at Emmaus in the Codex Egberti, fol. 88r

Fol. 88r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) is a full-page picture in two registers. It illustrates the appearance of the risen Christ to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as Luke 24:13–35, with the brief parallel in Mark 16:12. In the Roman lectionary this passage is the Gospel of Easter Monday. If the codex follows that order, the page comes immediately after the Women at the Tomb on fol. 86v, the Gospel of Easter Sunday. The page is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Luke relates that on the day of the Resurrection two disciples were walking to a village (castellum) called Emmaus, sixty furlongs from Jerusalem. One of them was named Cleopas. “Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.” When they reached the village they constrained him to stay with them, “and it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him” (Luke 24:15–31). The two registers of the page follow the two stages of this narrative: the journey and the meal.

The upper register: the road to Emmaus.

On a pale rose ground over green earth, the colours recorded in 1884, three figures walk side by side. Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed in gold, walks in the middle. He wears a white tunic and a greenish mantle, the “grünlichen” of 1884, and holds a book. At the left, labelled CLEOPAS, the disciple named by Luke wears a violet mantle, as the 1884 edition records, and raises his hand in conversation. At the right walks the second disciple in a blue mantle, also as recorded in 1884.

The gold label names him LUCAS. The Gospel leaves the companion of Cleopas unnamed. The identification with Luke himself, the evangelist who records the episode, belongs to a later exegetical tradition. Its appearance here as an inscription is notable, but its source is not identified here. The three figures walk calmly on the green ground. Nothing in Christ’s appearance marks him as unrecognisable to the disciples, but his central position and his nimbus make him immediately identifiable to the reader of the book. This gives visual form to the dramatic irony of the Gospel text, in which the disciples do not know the companion they are speaking with.

The lower register: the supper at Emmaus.

A gold inscription at the upper left of this register reads CASTEL[LUM] EMMAUS, the Vulgate’s word for the village, castellum. The painter renders it literally as a small fortified enclosure. Grey ashlar walls, the colour given in 1884, are reinforced at the corners by green towers, the “Thürme grün” of the 1884 description. Inside the enclosure, as if seen over the walls, Christ sits at a round table covered with a red cloth. He is labelled IHC XPC, nimbed, and dressed again in his greenish mantle. A round loaf lies on the table. The disciple at the left leans forward over the table with outstretched hands, and the disciple at the right sits close to Christ. The 1884 edition gives their outer garments as blue and violet.

The painter has chosen the moment of the meal, when Christ “took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them”. The disciples’ recognition of him, cognoverunt eum in fractione panis (Luke 24:35), is implied by the leaning gesture of the disciple at the left. The image does not show the sudden disappearance of Christ that follows in the Gospel (et ipse evanuit ex oculis eorum, 24:31).

The two registers are clearly related. The same three figures appear in both, identified by their consistent colours, Christ always in green, the disciples in blue and violet. The open road of the upper scene is set against the enclosed space of the village below. In the first scene the disciples speak with Christ without knowing him. In the second they recognise him at the table. The eucharistic resonance of the breaking of bread, central to the Lucan narrative and to its liturgical use in Easter week, is evident in the placing of the loaf at the centre of the lower register, though whether the painter intended a specific allusion to the Mass cannot be documented.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. As on several other pages, the horizontal ruling of the parchment is visible through the pale ground.

“It Is the Lord”: Christ Appears by the Sea of Tiberias in the Codex Egberti, fol. 90r

The appearance of the risen Christ by the Sea of Tiberias occupies fol. 90r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 21:1–14 and titles the scene Jesus offenbart sich am See Tiberias; der wunderbare Fischzug, “Jesus shows himself at the Sea of Tiberias; the miraculous draught of fishes”. In the Roman lectionary this passage is the Gospel of the Wednesday of Easter week. The image interrupts the pericope: the line beneath it reads Non tamen cognoverunt discipuli quia Iesus est, “but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus” (John 21:4). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John relates that seven disciples had gone fishing at night and caught nothing. In the morning Christ stood on the shore and told them to cast the net on the right side of the ship, “and now they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes”. The disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord.” Then Simon Peter, “when he heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher’s coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into the sea”. When they came to land, “they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread”. Peter “drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three” (John 21:2–11).

The painter follows this account with remarkable precision, including the names of the disciples. John 21:2 lists those present as “Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other of his disciples”. The gold labels in the miniature name NATHAN[AEL], FILII ZEBED[AEI] (“the sons of Zebedee”), THOMAS and PETR(US). The boat holds six figures, and with Peter outside it they make up the seven disciples of the Gospel. The 1884 edition notes that, as always, only Peter has white hair.

At the left the red boat, with its animal-headed prow (the type already used on fols. 24r and 27v), rides on white-crested waves. One disciple rows. The others turn towards the shore with outstretched hands, in a gesture of recognition and wonder. The 1884 edition gives their mantles as yellowish white, red, violet, bluish, grey-blue and blue. One of the foremost leans forward with both arms extended. He may be the beloved disciple who first recognises Christ, but no label identifies him individually.

At the centre Peter, labelled PETR, has left the boat and wades through the shallows towards the shore. He is half-naked, his torso bare, with a bluish garment wrapped about his loins. The garment is the “fisher’s coat” with which, according to John, he girded himself, and the 1884 edition gives it the same bluish white as the sea. With his left hand he drags behind him the red net, the colour recorded in 1884, full of large fishes. The painter thus combines in a single figure two successive moments of the narrative: Peter’s eager plunge into the sea and his drawing of the net to land.

At the right Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed in gold, stands on a rocky shore. He wears a white tunic and a pale mantle and holds a book in his left hand. He stretches out his right hand towards Peter and the disciples in a gesture of greeting or command. At his feet lies a fire of glowing coals, red in the 1884 description, with a fish laid upon it, which the 1884 edition calls blue. Beside it is a round loaf. These are the “fire of coals, and fish laid thereon, and bread” of John 21:9. Christ has prepared the meal to which he will invite the disciples: “Come and dine” (21:12).

The composition reads from left to right as a movement from the sea to the shore, from the disciples’ uncertainty to their recognition of Christ. The boat with its crowded figures occupies the left half. Peter, half in the water, bridges the space between boat and land. Christ, standing apart on the shore, closes the composition at the right. The net with its fishes, the fire and the bread are placed in the foreground as the material signs of the miracle and of the meal. The juxtaposition of the image with the line of text below it, which states that the disciples did not yet know it was Jesus, gives the page a dramatic irony.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: compact figures in the boat with closely overlapping heads, broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes. Peter’s half-naked body offers the painter an opportunity for anatomical modelling rare in the cycle. As on several other pages, the horizontal ruling of the parchment is visible through the pale ground.

“Touch Me Not”: Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene in the Codex Egberti, fol. 91r

The appearance of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene occupies fol. 91r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The photographic catalogue of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg records it as Erscheinung Christi vor Maria Magdalena. The 1884 plate edition identifies the text as John 20:1–18. In the Roman lectionary John 20:11–18 is the Gospel of the Thursday of Easter week. If the codex follows that order, the page comes immediately after the appearance by the Sea of Tiberias on fol. 90r (Wednesday of the same week). The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John relates that Mary stood weeping outside the sepulchre, “and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain”. They asked her why she wept. Turning back, she saw Jesus standing and did not know him, “supposing him to be the gardener”. When he called her by name, she recognised him, and he said to her: “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father” (Noli me tangere, John 20:11–17). The miniature brings together the encounter with the angels and the encounter with Christ in a single garden landscape.

At the left lies the empty tomb, a large open sarcophagus of green stone drawn in steep perspective, the “Grab grün” of the 1884 description. Within it a white cloth hangs over the edge: the linen clothes and the napkin “wrapped together in a place by itself” that Peter and John had found (20:6–7).

Two angels, nimbed and holding staffs, keep watch over the tomb. The 1884 edition describes their wings as red. One appears in half-length above the far end of the sarcophagus, the other sits on the ground at its near end. The painter has thus followed the precise detail of the Gospel, “one at the head, and the other at the feet”. Both are dressed in white, in albis, and the upper angel raises his hand towards Mary, as if addressing her:

Mulier, quid ploras?

At the centre of the picture rises a slender grey tree with stylised branches, the “Baum grau” of 1884. It marks the garden in which the tomb lay (John 19:41). It may also allude to Mary’s mistaking Christ for the gardener, hortulanus, although this is an interpretation rather than a documented intention. The tree stands between the angels and the tomb on one side and the meeting of Christ and Mary on the other, dividing the composition into its two episodes.

At the right Mary, labelled MARIA, bows low in a red-brown mantle and stretches out both hands towards Christ’s feet. Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, stands before her. He wears a white tunic and a greenish mantle, the “grünlich” of the 1884 description, and holds a book in his left hand. He bends slightly towards her and extends his right hand above her head. The gesture can be read as a blessing, or as the restraining gesture of Noli me tangere: Mary reaches out to touch him, and he holds her back with the raised hand. The interval between her outstretched hands and his feet, small but clearly preserved, gives visual form to the prohibition of the Gospel text.

The composition reads from left to right as the movement of Mary’s experience. First comes the empty tomb, with the angels and the abandoned grave clothes; then the tree of the garden; finally the encounter with the risen Christ. The steep diagonal of the sarcophagus at the left is balanced by the upright figure of Christ at the right. The bowed figure of Mary, low and close to the ground, forms the link between them. The Noli me tangere has received specific scholarly attention as one of the notable iconographic solutions of the codex.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The red-orange wings of the angels, set against the green of the tomb, are among the most vivid colour accents of this part of the cycle. As on several other pages, the horizontal ruling and faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale upper part of the picture.

“My Lord and My God”: The Incredulity of Thomas in the Codex Egberti, fol. 93r

The Incredulity of Thomas occupies fol. 93r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). The 1884 plate edition titles it Thomas befühlt die Wundmale des Herrn, “Thomas touches the wounds of the Lord”, and identifies the text as John 20:24–31. In the Roman lectionary John 20:19–31 is the Gospel of the octave of Easter, Low Sunday (Dominica in Albis). If the codex follows that order, the page concludes the series of Easter-week appearances that began with the Women at the Tomb on fol. 86v. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

John relates that Thomas was not with the other disciples when Christ first appeared to them, and that he declared: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Eight days later Christ came again and said to Thomas: “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God” (John 20:25–28).

The composition is set against a pale rose ground above a strip of yellow-green earth, the colours recorded in 1884.

At the left stand the apostles, labelled APLI. They wear white-bluish tunics, as the 1884 edition records, and mantles of blue and red. The apostle in red is white-haired and bearded, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter. The apostles hold their hands before their chests and watch quietly.

At the centre Thomas, labelled THOMAS, steps forward in a violet mantle, the “violett (Thomas)” of the 1884 description. He extends his right index finger towards Christ’s side, while his left hand is held open below it. His posture, leaning forward with arm outstretched, is the visual equivalent of Christ’s invitation,

Infer digitum tuum huc.

His upturned face and the gesture of his second hand suggest the confession that follows,

Dominus meus et Deus meus.

At the right Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, stands on a low mound of earth, slightly raised above Thomas and the apostles. He wears a white-bluish tunic and a greenish mantle, the “grünlich (Christus)” of 1884. He raises his right arm high above his head, so that his side is exposed, and with his left hand draws back the folds of his garment to reveal the wound. The gesture is the most distinctive element of the composition. It is Christ himself who presents his body for examination, in response to Thomas’s doubt. The raised arm creates a strong vertical accent, and the drawn-back garment directs attention to the precise point of the wound towards which Thomas’s finger is moving.

The raised mound on which Christ stands distinguishes the risen Lord from the disciples who approach him. Without any architectural setting, and without the closed doors that John mentions (ianuis clausis, 20:26), the scene is reduced to its essential exchange: doubt that asks for proof, and the body that offers it. Whether the painter intended to show the moment before Thomas touches the wound or the moment of touching itself cannot be determined from the image. The finger is very close to Christ’s side, but the Gospel itself does not say that Thomas actually touched it.

The composition reads clearly from left to right: the waiting apostles, the advancing Thomas, the revealing Christ. The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. As on several other pages, faint lines of writing from the other side of the leaf show through the pale ground.

“Go Ye into All the World”: Christ Appears to the Eleven in the Codex Egberti, fol. 100v

The appearance of Christ to the eleven apostles occupies fol. 100v of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24), according to the 1884 plate edition. That edition titles it Jesus erscheint den Elfen vor seiner Himmelfahrt, “Jesus appears to the Eleven before his Ascension”, and identifies the text as Mark 16:14–18. In the Roman lectionary Mark 16:14–20 is the Gospel of Ascension Day. The Ascension itself is illustrated on fol. 101r, so the two miniatures face each other across a single opening and present the two parts of the same reading: the final commission to the apostles on the left, Christ’s departure into heaven on the right. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Mark’s text is brief and solemn: “Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:14–15). The miniature presents this final address in a composition of two groups.

At the left Christ, labelled IHC XPC and nimbed with a gold cross-nimbus, stands alone on a strip of yellow-green earth. The sky above is lilac in the 1884 description. He wears a white tunic and a yellow-green mantle, the colour recorded in 1884. He raises his right hand with the index finger extended. The gesture can be read as the reproach of their unbelief,

exprobravit incredulitatem eorum,

or as the command to go and preach,

euntes in mundum universum.

The image does not distinguish between the two. Christ’s standing, isolated figure faces the whole college of the apostles and addresses them with authority.

At the right the apostles are seated on a long bench in two rows, labelled UNDECIM, “the Eleven”, the very word of Mark 16:14. In the front row sits Peter, labelled PETR, white-haired and bearded in a violet mantle, as the 1884 edition specifies (“violett (Petrus)”). He raises his hands towards Christ. The other apostles wear mantles of red, blue and violet, in the alternating sequence given by the 1884 edition, and turn towards Christ with attentive faces and raised hands.

Across the knees of those in the front row lies a long yellow-green cloth, which the 1884 edition gives as the same colour as the bench. As in the Meal in Levi’s House on fol. 29r, this cloth spread over the laps stands for the table. It indicates that the apostles are “at meat”, recumbentibus illis, as the Gospel says, without introducing a table into the composition. The repetition of this convention on two pages so far apart suggests that it belonged to the established pictorial vocabulary of the painters of the codex.

The composition is built on the contrast between the single standing figure of Christ and the compact, seated mass of the apostles. Christ occupies the left third of the picture with ample space around him. The apostles fill the right two-thirds, their heads rising in tiers. The interval between Christ’s pointing hand and Peter’s raised hands carries the exchange of the scene. The arrangement makes visible both the authority of the risen Christ and the collective character of the mission he entrusts to the apostles as a body.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, the repeated heads of the apostles varied in hair and beard, and slightly elongated proportions.

“Why Stand Ye Gazing Up into Heaven?”: The Ascension in the Codex Egberti, fol. 101r

The Ascension occupies fol. 101r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24). It is a tall picture filling most of the page. The 1884 plate edition identifies its sources as Mark 16:19, Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:1–11. The Gospel for Ascension Day in the Roman lectionary is Mark 16:14–20, whose closing verses record that Christ “was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God”. The miniature faces the appearance of Christ to the Eleven, which the 1884 edition places on fol. 100v. The two images thus present the two parts of the same reading across a single opening. The miniature is not among the seven attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

Mark’s account is laconic, and the painter drew much of the content of the image from the Acts of the Apostles, the source read as the Epistle on the same feast. Acts relates that as the apostles watched, “he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:9–11). Acts also names Mary, the mother of Jesus, among those gathered with the apostles in Jerusalem after the Ascension (1:14). The miniature thus combines the Gospel reading of the day with the account of its Epistle.

The composition is divided into two zones: heaven above and earth below. In the upper half Christ ascends within an almond-shaped mandorla. Its inner field is green and blue; the 1884 edition speaks of a green aureole. It is surrounded by bands of gold and purple decorated with gold ornament, as the 1884 edition records.

Christ, nimbed in gold and wearing a white tunic and a yellow-green mantle (the “gelbgrün” of 1884), strides upward in profile. With his right hand he grasps a hand that reaches down from the upper edge of the mandorla, the Hand of God, while he holds a staff, apparently topped by a cross, in his left. This is the type of the Ascension that the Marburg catalogue describes: Christ climbing into heaven and taking hold of the hand of God. It is a Western formula found in Carolingian and Ottonian art. It differs from the Byzantine type, in which Christ is enthroned frontally in a mandorla carried by angels. Here the Ascension is shown as an active movement, an ascent in which Christ is drawn up by the Father.

In the lower half, on a hill of yellow and grey mounds that stands for the Mount of Olives (the “Erde gelb” of 1884), stand the witnesses. At the centre the two men in white of Acts 1:10, labelled DUO VIRI, are represented as winged angels. They are nimbed, hold long staffs, and wear white tunics under yellowish mantles; the 1884 edition gives the mantles as dirty yellow and the wings as red-yellow. Each raises one arm high and points upward to the ascending Christ. Their gesture gives visual form to their words: “Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?”

At the left, labelled APO-STOLI with the word divided across the picture, stand the apostles. Among them is Mary, labelled SCA MARIA, nimbed, in a violet mantle, as the 1884 edition specifies, raising her hands. At the right, also among the apostles, Peter, labelled PETR, white-haired and bearded in a red mantle, lifts both hands towards heaven. The other apostles wear mantles of red, blue, white and violet, as recorded in 1884, and look up or raise their hands.

The composition is strictly organised around a vertical axis. The mandorla at the top, the two angels at the centre and the hill at the bottom are aligned. The raised arms of the angels lead the eye from the earthly group up to the ascending Christ, and the apostles on both sides frame them symmetrically. The empty space between the heads of the witnesses and the mandorla separates heaven and earth. The upward gestures of the figures below bridge that space and make the moment of departure visible.

The figures show the characteristics of the collaborating painters: broad drapery planes edged with gold, faces with large dark eyes, slightly elongated proportions. The mandorla, with its coloured bands and gold ornament, is one of the most richly decorated motifs in the codex.

“Tongues Like as of Fire”: Pentecost in the Codex Egberti, fol. 103r

The Pentecost miniature occupies fol. 103r of the Codex Egberti (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 24) and is the last narrative image of the cycle. The 1884 plate edition gives it a full title: the feast of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and Peter’s sermon to the Jews from foreign lands. It identifies the text as Acts 2:1–39.

The leaf is codicologically unusual. The 1884 edition, following the study of the gatherings published three years earlier, records that the codex is regularly composed of quaternions, with the exception of the first two gatherings and of fol. 103 itself. This page is a single leaf glued into the eighteenth gathering. The reason for the insertion is not stated. The page is not among the seven miniatures attributed to the Gregory Master and is assigned by exclusion to his collaborating painters.

As with the Ascension on fol. 101r, the image draws not on the Gospel of the feast but on the account in the Acts of the Apostles, read as the Epistle at Mass on Pentecost. The Gospel of Pentecost in the Roman lectionary is John 14:23–31. Acts relates that the apostles were “all with one accord in one place”, that “there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them”, and that the multitude of “devout men, out of every nation under heaven” came together, “confounded” and “amazed”, at hearing them speak in their own languages (Acts 2:1–6). Peter then addressed them (2:14–36), and those who believed were baptised and “had all things common” (2:41–45).

The composition is divided into two zones. In the upper zone the apostles sit in a semicircular, stepped arrangement of seats, red-yellow in the 1884 description. Above them rises an arcade of niches whose grounds alternate between blue and green, as the 1884 edition records. The arrangement recalls the synthronon, the tiered bench for the clergy in the apse of a church, and gives the gathering of the apostles the character of a council or of an ecclesiastical assembly.

Twelve apostles are seated, the number restored after the election of Matthias (Acts 1:26). Their mantles alternate in the sequence the 1884 edition lists: red, violet, blue, violet, green, blue, violet, red, blue, violet, green and red. At the centre, beneath the highest arch, sits a white-haired, bearded apostle in a red mantle, in keeping with the codex’s type for Peter, the speaker of the sermon that follows. The apostles raise their open hands before their chests in a gesture of reception or prayer.

At the apex of the arcade the dove of the Holy Spirit descends, small and white, with rays spreading from it. The tongues of fire of Acts 2:3 are not clearly distinguishable.

Above the arcade runs the inscription

SPIRITUS HOS EDOCENS LINGUIS HIC ARDET ET IGNE.

It may be rendered, “Here the Spirit, teaching them, burns with tongues and with fire.” The dove interrupts the word EDOCENS at the centre, so that the Spirit is placed visually within the very word that names his teaching. A more recent study of this page has drawn attention to this division of the word. It has interpreted the page in terms of the relationship between sight and hearing, the “spiritual seeing” through which the image and the inscription work together.

In the lower zone stand the Jews from foreign lands, in secular dress: white tunics, cloaks, coloured hose and dark boots, as the 1884 edition describes in detail, including one mantle “blue with stars”. They stand on uneven ground and look up towards the apostles, several raising their hands in astonishment. Across this zone runs the second inscription, QUA CAUSA TREMULI CONVENIUNT POPULI, “for which reason the trembling peoples come together”. It corresponds to the amazement and confusion of the multitude in Acts 2:6–12.

Between the two zones, at the centre of the page, stands a low red vessel filled with gold coins, labelled COMMUNIS VITA, “common life”. The 1884 edition identifies it as a symbol of the community of goods of Acts 2:44–45, an offertory box. The more recent study mentioned above reads it instead as a baptismal font, symbolising both the common life of the first community and the baptism of the three thousand who believed (Acts 2:41). The two readings are not mutually exclusive, and the page itself does not settle the question. In either case, the vessel at the centre links the apostles above, who have received the Spirit, with the crowd below, who will be drawn into the community of the Church.

The composition is one of the most carefully structured in the codex. The upper zone, with its arcade and seated apostles, is ordered and hierarchical. The lower zone, with its standing crowd and varied colours, is animated and diverse. The two are joined by the strong angle of the apostles’ bench, which descends towards the crowd on either side, and by the vertical axis that runs from the dove through the central apostle to the vessel of the common life. The inscriptions frame and interpret the image in the manner of tituli, as on fol. 80v. Together they make the page a statement about the birth of the Church: the gift of the Spirit, the preaching of the apostles, and the gathering of the peoples into a common life.

Attribution, the Gregory Master, and the Reichenau–Trier Debate

No aspect of the Codex Egberti has generated more sustained scholarly controversy than the twin questions of who painted it and where it was made. These questions are entangled, and they open onto the largest problem in the study of Ottonian illumination: the very existence and location of the “Reichenau school.” The manuscript sits at the centre of that problem.

Begin with the most damaging of the popular errors: the statement that “the Gregory Master painted the Codex Egberti.” He did not paint all of it, and the best scholarship has never claimed that he did. The anonymous artist known as the Gregory Master — in German the Gregormeister or Meister des Registrum Gregorii — takes his name from the two surviving illuminated leaves of Egbert’s Registrum Gregorii: one showing the Emperor Otto II enthroned amid personifications of the four provinces of his empire, now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly (Ms. 14bis), and one showing Pope Gregory the Great inspired by the dove of the Holy Spirit, now in Trier (Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 171/1626a).

These leaves are the touchstone of his style, and on their basis a substantial body of work has been assembled around him. Within the Codex Egberti, however, his hand is generally recognised in only a limited number of the miniatures. The description issued with the 2005 facsimile (as reproduced by Facsimile Finder) credits him with “the portraits of Egbert and the evangelists and the opening Christological miniatures”, a wider share than the photographic catalogue records, and the page of the Trier library speaks of a Trier Gregormeister who painted a series of the illustrations.

The seven usually named are the miniatures placed on folios 9v, 10v, 12r, 13r, 15v, 22r, and 22v — the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Dream of Joseph, the Nativity with the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Centurion of Capernaum, and the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law — with minor variations of recto and verso in the literature. His larger role was as the director of the enterprise: he appears to have designed the programme and provided underdrawings that the other painters then executed. The remaining miniatures are the work of collaborating painters — the core scholarly description identifies two illuminators working under the master’s supervision, “at least in some instances, painting over his underdrawings,” though some recent characterisations distinguish further hands.

Folio	Miniature
9v	The Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38)
10v	The Visitation (Luke 1:39–47)
12r	The Dream of Joseph (Matthew 1:18–21)
13r	The Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds (Luke 2:1–18)
15v	The Massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16–18)
22r	Christ and the Centurion of Capernaum (Matthew 8:5–13)
22v	The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14–15)

This division of labour is not merely a matter of connoisseurial impression. It has been given a material basis by the scientific examination of the manuscript’s pigments and techniques, first published in the 1993 Egbert memorial volume and reproduced in connection with the 2005 facsimile commentary, and resting on the technical study carried out by the manuscript’s conservators. That analysis established that the hand identified as the Gregory Master can be distinguished from the others by concrete technical means. Only the Gregory Master, in this manuscript, used the blue pigment azurite; the other painters did not employ it.

He was also the only one of the participating painters who worked with washes — dilute, graded applications — in his underdrawings. And he had a characteristic way with gold: for his gold areas he frequently used gold leaf that was cut to shape and applied with an adhesive after the painted parts were finished, rather than laid down first. The same combination of techniques recurs in other works given to him, including the Strahov Evangeliary in Prague and the detached Registrum leaves.

The technical evidence, in other words, corroborates the stylistic attribution: the Gregory Master’s personal contribution, though decisive for the design, was a fraction of the whole. A curious secondary observation from the same technical study is that, because the Gregory Master tended to lay his backgrounds over the underdrawing without always reserving the drawn lines, his miniatures in the codex have in places suffered more damage than those of the other draughtsmen — an outcome that has even prompted the suggestion that his formation may not have been that of a conventionally trained manuscript illuminator.

Carl Nordenfalk, whose work first defined the artist as an art-historical personality and who established the fundamental chronology of his career, dated the closely related Sainte-Chapelle Gospels (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8851) to around 984 and placed the Codex Egberti a few years afterward.

The name “Gregory Master” remains what it has always been: a conventional label attached to an anonymous hand, defined by his works and not by any secure documentary identity.

It is with the work of Hartmut Hoffmann, in his study of Ottonian and early Salian book production, Buchkunst und Königtum im ottonischen und frühsalischen Reich (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften 30, Stuttgart, 1986), that the deeper question — where the manuscript was made — comes fully into focus. The traditional attribution, reflected in the dedication miniature’s two Reichenau monks and in the Augia of the dedicatory verse, was to Reichenau, and the manuscript has for a century been catalogued and displayed as a masterpiece of the “Reichenau school.” But Hoffmann’s palaeographical analysis of the script pointed in a different direction, relocating the writing of much of this body of manuscripts — and of the Gregory Master’s activity generally — toward Trier rather than the island monastery. This was part of a broader reassessment, in which a number of scholars questioned whether the great “Reichenau” manuscripts were made at Reichenau at all, some proposing Trier and Lorsch as the true centres, and pointing out that the attribution to the island rests on remarkably little direct evidence. The Gregory Master, on this view, worked chiefly at Trier, in the 970s and 980s, in the immediate service of Egbert.

The result is a genuine and unresolved tension. On one side stands the manuscript’s own testimony — the naming of Reichenau as donor and the depiction of two Reichenau monks — together with the long tradition of Reichenau attribution enshrined in, among other places, the 2003 UNESCO inscription, which places the Codex Egberti among manuscripts “produced in the monastery of Reichenau.” On the other side stands the palaeographical and art-historical case, associated above all with Hoffmann, for a Trier-centred production under the Gregory Master.

The current institutional formulation tends to speak of cooperation between Trier and Reichenau, and the facsimile-trade descriptions now routinely state that the manuscript was produced “at Reichenau or Trier,” leaving the question open. A very recent line of argument goes further still, proposing to dissolve the single “Gregory Master” into a cooperating workshop of specialists, each responsible for particular tasks — a reading that would further complicate any simple attribution to one hand or one place. This last position is a recent minority view rather than the consensus.

Weighing the evidence, the most defensible position — and the one adopted here — is that the Codex Egberti was a Trier-directed enterprise with a documented Reichenau connection. The book was made for the archbishop of Trier, in the ambit of his patronage and under the direction of an artist whose activity is most persuasively located in Trier; yet Reichenau is named, in the book itself, as the giver, and two of its monks are honoured in the dedication image. Precisely how the labour and the materials were divided between the island and the city — whether Reichenau supplied scribes, or the parchment, or the physical book to be completed at Trier, or served in some other capacity — cannot be recovered with certainty from the evidence now available.

What should be resisted, in either direction, is the false confidence that so often attends this manuscript: the flat assertion that it was “made at Reichenau by two monks” is no more warranted than the equally flat assertion that it has nothing to do with Reichenau at all.

Liturgical Function

For all the art-historical weight it now carries, the Codex Egberti was made to be used, and its structure is entirely governed by that use. As an evangelistary, it contains the Gospel pericopes appointed for Mass. Its text follows the Vulgate and the Western tradition, and its readings are ordered not as a continuous biography of Christ but according to the sequence of feasts: the temporale, the cycle of Sundays and moveable feasts centred on Christmas and Easter, together with the sanctorale, the fixed feasts of the saints.

The rubrics in gold and red Rustic Capitals mark out the feast days and identify each reading; the opening words of each pericope stand out in Uncial; and the interlace initials, especially the great I-initials, signal the beginning of the readings and help the celebrant or deacon navigate the book during the liturgy. The more than two hundred decorated initials are thus not only ornament but a functional apparatus for a book meant to be read aloud in the course of worship.

The physical format is consistent with this purpose. At 270 by 210 millimetres the manuscript is substantial enough for dignified liturgical display and legible proclamation, without being one of the vast lectern books produced for imperial foundations. It was, on the reasonable interpretation that runs through the literature, made for use in the liturgy of Trier — very plausibly, given its association with Egbert, for the archbishop’s own celebration of Mass at the cathedral — and its selection and annotation of readings adapt the book to the observances of the Trier church.

Whatever its precise first destination within Egbert’s city, the manuscript remained in liturgical service across an extraordinary span of time. It later belonged to the collegiate church of St Paulinus at Trier, where, according to the local tradition reported in the institutional literature, it continued to be used in worship into the eighteenth century — some seven hundred years after it was made. Few Ottonian manuscripts can be shown to have served their original function for so long. The book that now stands at the head of every history of the narrative image was, for most of its life, simply the Gospel book from which the appointed readings were sung.

The relationship between image and rite deserves emphasis. Because the miniatures are distributed according to the readings, the pictorial cycle is experienced, in liturgical use, not as a continuous story told from beginning to end but as a series of images encountered feast by feast, each illuminating the passage proclaimed on its day. The visual cycle thus became a commentary on the Gospel as it was heard through the year. The Codex Egberti is, in this precise sense, a liturgical exegesis in images, and its status as the earliest extensive Christ cycle in a Western book is inseparable from its identity as a working evangelistary.

Afterlife, Reception, and Historiography

The subsequent history of the Codex Egberti is, remarkably, a history almost entirely contained within a single city. Unlike so many Ottonian treasures, which travelled across Europe as diplomatic gifts, dynastic inheritances, and spoils of secularisation — the companion Egbert Psalter, for instance, made its way from Trier to Kyivan Rus’ and ultimately to Cividale in Italy — the Codex Egberti never left Trier. Made in or for the city in the late tenth century, it passed at some point to the collegiate church of St Paulinus and then, in the wake of the secularisation of ecclesiastical property that followed the French Revolution and the Napoleonic reorganisation of the Rhineland, entered the municipal library of Trier — the present Stadtbibliothek — in 1810. Its provenance is, in the words of the UNESCO nomination, an “undisrupted history of ownership,” and that continuity is part of the reason the manuscript is so securely documented.

Before 1810 the manuscript lost its original binding; as already noted, the present binding is modern, and the frequently encountered impression that the Codex Egberti still wears a jewelled Ottonian cover is incorrect. This loss is regrettable but not unusual: treasure bindings, being made of gold, silver, and gems, were the most vulnerable part of any luxury manuscript, routinely stripped for their materials or transferred to other books, and a great many Ottonian codices survive, as this one does, in later or modern bindings.

The twentieth century brought the gravest threat to the manuscript’s survival. Trier suffered heavily from aerial bombardment during the Second World War, and the Codex Egberti is said to have escaped destruction only because it had been evacuated from the endangered city. The institutional and facsimile literature reports this consistently, and there is no reason to doubt the broad fact; but the precise circumstances are not documented in the detail one would wish, and the claim is best reported with appropriate caution rather than dramatised.

The modern scholarly and public reception of the manuscript can be traced through its facsimiles, which are themselves landmarks in the study of the book. A full facsimile appeared in 1960, edited by Hubert Schiel and published by the Alkuin-Verlag in Basel. A partial facsimile with scholarly commentary followed in 1983, edited by Gunther Franz and Franz J. Ronig and published by Reichert in Wiesbaden. And in 2005 a further facsimile with an extensive commentary volume was published by the Faksimile Verlag of Lucerne, the commentary edited by Gunther Franz and incorporating the technical and art-historical contributions — including the pigment and technique analysis — that have done so much to clarify the division of hands. These editions, together with the exhibition and catalogue mounted for the millennial anniversary of Egbert’s death in 1993, mark the stages by which the Codex Egberti has been made accessible and subjected to ever closer study.

Within the wider historiography, the manuscript has occupied a shifting but always central place. In the older literature it was a keystone of the “Reichenau school,” cited as one of the supreme achievements of the island scriptorium. The reassessment of that school — the questioning of the Reichenau localisation, the relocation of the Gregory Master’s activity toward Trier, associated above all with the work of Hartmut Hoffmann, and the careful chronological and stylistic analyses of the Gregory Master initiated by Carl Nordenfalk — transformed the manuscript from a secure exhibit of Reichenau art into a contested test case for the whole category.

The detailed folio-level attributions and the anchoring of the manuscript in its specific Trier context owe much to the work of Franz J. Ronig, whose engagement with the manuscript spanned the 1983 and 2005 facsimile commentaries and the 1993 Egbert memorial volume.

Comparanda and Conclusion

The Codex Egberti is best understood not in isolation but within the constellation of related manuscripts and objects that surround it, several of which have already been mentioned and which together define its artistic and intellectual coordinates.

Closest to it in patronage is the Egbert Psalter (Cividale, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Ms. CXXXVI), made about 980 for Egbert, in which the scribe Ruodprecht presents the book to the archbishop, who in turn presents it to Saint Peter — the same theology of Petrine, apostolic Trier that pervades Egbert’s metalwork, and a manuscript whose later history, with the Byzantine-style miniatures added for the Kyivan princess Gertruda, gives it the name Codex Gertrudianus. Closest to the Codex Egberti in artistic hand are the detached leaves of the Registrum Gregorii and the Sainte-Chapelle Gospels (Paris, BnF, lat. 8851), both central to the definition of the Gregory Master and both, on the chronology established by Nordenfalk, roughly contemporary with or slightly earlier than our manuscript. The Strahov Evangeliary in Prague belongs to the same orbit, sharing the Gregory Master’s distinctive gold technique.

Reaching backward, the Gero Codex (Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Cod. 1948), an evangelistary made at Reichenau before or about 969 for Gero, the future archbishop of Cologne, and written by the scribe Anno, stands near the beginning of the tradition of deluxe Ottonian lectionaries and shows the state of the art a generation before Egbert; its decoration is dominated by evangelist portraits, a Maiestas Domini, and dedication images, with as yet nothing approaching a narrative Christ cycle.

Reaching forward, the Pericopes of Henry II (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4452), made around 1007–1012 for the Emperor Henry II and given by him to his new cathedral of Bamberg, shows what the tradition became: a grand imperial evangelistary whose narrative miniatures descend, in part, from the pictorial achievements first realised in the Codex Egberti. Set between the Gero Codex and the Pericopes of Henry II, the Codex Egberti reveals itself as the decisive innovation: the moment at which the Ottonian evangelistary acquired an extended narrative cycle of the life of Christ.

The comparison with these manuscripts clarifies what is and is not special about the Codex Egberti. It is not unique in being a luxury evangelistary, nor in carrying a donor portrait and a dedicatory poem, nor in drawing on Late Antique and Byzantine sources: all of these it shares with its neighbours. What is unique is the fifty-one-scene cycle of the life of Christ — the sustained, integrated, liturgically ordered narrative that no earlier surviving Western book possesses and that later books would inherit and expand. That, in the end, is the manuscript’s claim to significance.

For it is worth restating, in conclusion, how much of the manuscript’s popular reputation rests on assertions that the evidence does not support. The cycle numbers fifty-one narrative miniatures, not fifty-six or sixty; the UNESCO register records the inscription in 2003, while the Trier library gives 2004; the Gregory Master directed the programme and painted perhaps seven of the scenes, he did not paint the manuscript; the two Reichenau monks of the dedication miniature are documented as presenters, not proven as the scribes and painters; the attribution to Reichenau, enshrined though it is in the manuscript’s own dedication and in its UNESCO listing, is complicated by a powerful palaeographical case for Trier, so that the truest description is of a Trier-directed collaboration with a Reichenau connection; the lost Late Antique archetype is a hypothesis, not a fact; and the original treasure binding is long gone.

Strip away these accretions, and what remains is not less but more impressive: a working evangelistary, made for one of the great churchmen of the Ottonian Empire in the ambit of his own city, in which an anonymous master of rare sensibility and his collaborators created, for the first time in the medieval West, a book in which the whole life of Christ unfolds in images alongside the words of the Gospel. That the book then remained in Trier for a thousand years, used in the liturgy for seven centuries of that span and surviving the fires of the twentieth, only deepens its authority as a witness. The Codex Egberti earns its place at the head of the history of the narrative image not through the exaggerations of its admirers but through what it demonstrably is.