Narrative Sequence in the Miniatures of Tsar Ivan Alexander’s Gospel Book (British Library Add. MS 39627)
Narrative Sequence in the Miniatures of Tsar Ivan Alexander’s Gospel Book (British Library Add. MS 39627)

Summary/Abstract: Most scholars consider an eleventh-century Greek Gospel book in Paris (Bibiothèque nationale de France, MS Grec 74) the direct model for the illustrations in a Slavonic Gospel book (London, British Library, Add. MS 39627) copied for the Bulgarian tsar John (Ivan) Alexander (r. 1331–1371). In a recent monograph (2005), the philologist Iliya Talev argues that some narrative miniatures in the Paris manuscript reverse the sequence of the illustrated events, while the corresponding miniatures of the London Gospel place these events in their correct order. This shows, in Talev’s view, that the Bulgarian illustrations do not directly copy the eleventh-century Byzantine ones. Talev assumes faithful copying by means of anthivola (stencils), which could be accidentally flipped over, thus reversing the sequence of some scenes. My analysis of the miniatures shows that the painters were very sensitive to the text-image correspondence and that reversed sequence was a way to better link pictures and words. In some cases, the artists used a boustrophedon pattern, so that text lines and pictorial content could be jointly read as a continuous, non-interrupted narrative.

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