Joshua Roll

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The Joshua Roll is an illuminated manuscript , probably of the 10th century^[1] created in the Byzantine empire, according to many scholars by artists of the Imperial workshops in Constantinople.^[2] It has heavy Greco-Roman influences^[1] and is rendered in grisaille. The Roll is in the Vatican Library.^[3] It is incomplete, dimensions of the surviving parts being 31 cm high and about 10 metres long.^[4]

The Roll portrays the Old Testament Book of Joshua using a reduced version of the Septuagint text. It depicts the first 12 chapters, when Joshua was engaged in frequent and successful conquest^[5] At roughly this time, the Byzantine empire was enjoying military success in its campaigns in the Holy Land. The art is by multiple artists, with the coloring added in a separate step later. The lettering is in majuscule and minuscule forms.^[4] Curiously, the images are slanted at ten degrees, in a continuous frieze along the ten meters of the roll. Steven Wander, professor at the University of Connecticut, suggests this may be because the roll was intended to be wrapped around an architectural column as a sort of draft for artwork to be executed on the column.^[6]

Its origins have been much debated by art historians, and the roll is considered to be "one of the most important and difficult problems of Byzantine art."^[7] The text is acknowledged to be of the 10th century AD, but the art is sometimes placed in different centuries in differing chronologies and accounts of the Roll.^[7]

[edit] See also

Macedonian Renaissance
Castelseprio - Frescoes in a related style

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b "The 10th-century Joshua Roll is interesting as an example of Byzantine illuminated manuscript that shows the tenacious influence of Greco-Roman painting." Excerpted from "painting, Western." Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 January 2007.
^ "These illustrated book rolls could well have been derived from classical triumph columns whose artistic contents were rediscovered at the time when our manuscript was made. The Joshua Roll is generally thought to go back to Greco-Roman forms and painting."[1]
^ as "Palat. Gr. 431", in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana[2]
^ ^a ^b [3]
^ "Now believed to have been assembled in the tenth century on the basis of earlier, individual miniatures adorning volumes of the Octateuch (first eight books of the Bible: Genesis -Deuteronomy and Ruth, Joshua, and Judges), the Joshua Roll presents the illustrated text of the first twelve chapters of the biblical book of Joshua, when Joshua is most active and successful in his conquests."[4].
^ in the Stamford Times Professor re-examines mysterious document
^ ^a ^b "The Joshua Roll: A Work of the Macedonian Renaissance" -(a review of the named book by Kurt Weitzmann.) Review written by Adolf Katzenellenbogen. Published in Speculum, Vol. 26, No. 2. (Apr., 1951), pp. 421-425.