Getty Museum

Decorated Text Page

Date

late 13th century

Medium

Tempera colors, gold leaf, gold ink, and ink

Culture

Byzantine

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

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.

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