Decorated Text Page

From the Getty Museum record

With its decorative headpiece and enlarged, painted initial, the opening page of Saint John's Gospel faces a portrait of the saint. The headpiece decoration of foliate motifs within a vine scroll harmonizes with the decoration of the canon table pages at the beginning of the book. A scribe wrote the headpiece inscription in gold in a highly stylized display script. The text proper begins with a painted letter *epsilon* and then continues in a Greek minuscule script. Gold letters in the left margin mark the beginnings of sub-sections of the Gospel text.