Getty Museum

Miscellany: Physiologus; other texts

Date

about 1510–1520

Medium

Pen and red lead and iron gall inks, watercolors, tempera colors, and gold paint

Culture

Cretan

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

This miscellany in Greek contains a collection of theological texts and a Greek version of a bestiary, which was a very popular type of medieval book that described the characteristics of animals in moralizing Christian terms. A title on one of the opening pages identifies the bestiary as the “Physiologus,” a book written by an unknown authors in Alexandria sometime between the 2nd -4th century CE. However, the text in this volume is not known from any other version of the Physiologus. Instead, it seems to be a work on the same topic by a Greek Orthodox monk named Angelos Gregorios, also called Anthanasios, who is mentioned several times in the manuscript. He lived on the island of Crete, which was a Venetian colony in 1510, when this manuscript was probably written. The book contains other writings attributed to Angelos Gregorios, as well as the excerpted writings of several famous church fathers, including several theological invectives against Jews – a genre of text all too common in eastern and western Europe in the Middle Ages. The first text is illustrated with simple pen and wash drawings of the animals it describes. Unframed, they roam freely across the pages, acting out the traits and stories associated with them. On the title page, for instance, the lion, the King of Beasts and a symbol of courage, leaps forward, his level gaze fixed firmly on the viewer. Following the so-called “Physiologus,” there are a number of small diagrams illustrating abstract Christian concepts found within the other texts, and nearer to the end of the manuscript are several images of Christian sacred figures, embellished with gold and red. In places throughout the manuscript, someone contemporaneous or almost contemporaneous with the production of the book pasted pieces of paper over the existing text and images. Some of these paste-ons offer new passages and pictures, while others simply cover older material. The changes may suggest that sections of the book that were originally written during the lifetime of Angelos Gregorios underwent an early editing process, perhaps sometime in the sixteenth century.

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