Canon Table Page

From the Getty Museum record

On this page of the canon tables from the Zeyt'un Gospels, the left side displays the concordances among the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John, while the right side has two columns of numbers indicating common passages found in only Matthew and Luke. The illuminator of this image, T'oros Roslin, paid homage to his teacher Yohannes by taking the format of this page directly from one of Yohannes's manuscripts. Each set of canon tables usually occupied numerous consecutive pages, challenging the illuminator to keep the traditional architectural structure of canon tables from becoming tedious. Roslin approached the problem by closely relating the images of the facing sides of a double-page spread while varying the small-scale details. For instance, though the birds and plants are of the same kind on this folio and the facing canon table page, the jewelry-work designs in the attic use different geometric shapes.