Getty Museum

Canon Table Page

Date

1256

Medium

Tempera and gold paint

Culture

Armenian

Department

Manuscripts

Institution

Getty Museum

On this lavishly painted canon table page illuminated by T'oros Roslin, the architecture houses columns of numbers indicating those passages that are common to two Gospels. In the left column are passages common to Matthew and Luke and in the right, passages common to Matthew and Mark. On the sides, birds balance on the uppermost branches of pomegranate trees to peck at the capitals. Above them, fantastic shrubs, topped by symmetrically posed birds, sprout from planters. Atop the rectangular structure, roosters extend their long necks, with their fluffy feathers highlighted by gold paint. The handling of these closely observed elements from nature contrasts with the tightly controlled geometric shapes of the architecture. Roslin used similar details on the facing folio to link the two images across the double page spread.

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