FINDING HIDDEN IMAGERY IN AN ILLUMINATED PAGE
A guided tour of the Zeytun Gospel’s Canon Tables reveals the extraordinary life of a matchless Armenian artwork
HEGHNAR ZEITLIAN WATENPAUGH
Stanford press.typepad.com
Consider this page from the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
The illuminated page features an architectural frame supported by three columns. Between the columns are golden grids that contain letters written in the Armenian alphabet. The letters stand for numbers, and the grids are concordance lists of passages that relate the same events in two or more of the four Gospels. In the Middle Ages, canon tables almost always preceded the Gospels. They occupied several pages and were among the most elaborately decorated passages in a manuscript. The Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels were created in 1256, the first signed work of Toros Roslin, now recognized as the greatest medieval Armenian illuminator. On this page, you see areas of geometric ornament enhanced with gold ink and jewel-like colors. When you look closely at the ornamental field, you find pairs of partridges and blue birds hidden in the gold leaf, pecking at tendrils. There are two faces staring out from the upper section, their expressions enigmatic. The column capitals are actually ox heads rendered in blue. Plants and animals surround the architectural frame. At the top of the page, two roosters stride confidently towards a jeweled vase, their tail feathers outlined in gold. Flanking the frame are floral motifs and pomegranate trees where two species of birds frolic.
Roslin conceived of his canon tables as matching pairs. When you opened the book, they appeared on two facing pages that echoed each other’s decoration. You can see how the matching page features a similar arrangement, with the same roosters, ox-head column capitals, and pomegranate trees (see Ms. 59, fol. 5v and 6r). As your eye travels from one page to the other, you delight in discerning differences: the roosters nibble at the bottom of the vase rather than striding towards it, the birds are all different, and on the lower row they peck at the column capitals. The hidden faces in the architectural frames have vanished, leaving behind indigo arabesques emerging from horns of plenty.
Art historians have analyzed these motifs, comparing Roslin’s Canon Tables to those of his masters, and pointing out how within this conventional abstract subject matter, Roslin innovated by introducing new motifs drawn from European, Islamic, or even Chinese elements. The Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, where Roslin worked, was a crossroads on the Eastern Mediterranean, and its artists both maintained the ancient tradition of Armenian Christianity and opened up to new ideas and influences.
When you see this artwork on display, however, you will not see the matching pairs together.
The Getty has only a fragment of the Zeytun Gospels, its Canon Tables. Detached from the book, the Canon Tables appear as four sheets ofparchment folded in the middle, or bifolia (see Ms, 59, fols 3v-6r). These folded sheets of parchment were once nested together in a gathering and bound in a book, where the pages appeared in a carefully ordered sequence. On exhibition, you will see a bifolium featuring two connected pages. However, the illuminations on the connected folios are not the matching pairs the painter intended to be seen together. They are images from two different sets.
In this example, you notice that the Canon Table facing the page with the roosters you examined earlier is not a subtle echo, but rather a different composition. Here the architectural frame features ornate horseshoe arches, the columns have painted interlaces, and their capitals are made up of birds. We have palm trees surmounted by owls, and at the top of the page, four birds play among the plants that emerge from a jeweled urn.
Viewing the Canon Tables displayed at the museum, you will also notice another feature that does not readily lend itself to photography. A crease extends horizontally across the two connected pages. This crease tells you something about the life story of the Canon Tables. It was likely caused when the gathering was removed from the mother manuscript and folded up. This crease enables you to imagine how, at some point, unknown hands removed the Canon Tables from the mother manuscript, how they folded it, and took it away. The crease shows us that the work of art bears the imprint of the actions it endured, and of its separation from the mother manuscript. This crease marks the moment when the work became a fragment; it is the trace of its loss.
At that moment the Zeytun Gospels cleaved into two. Each piece acquired a new possessor and embarked on a distinct journey. The mother manuscript followed a twisted path that eventually took it to the Republic of Armenia. The Canon Tables left the Mediterranean littoral, moved across the Atlantic Ocean, and decades later made landfall on the Pacific shore, in the world’s wealthiest museum. In Los Angeles, descendants of the community that once revered the Zeytun Gospels as a devotional object brought out only on special religious occasions can now view its detached Canon Tables on exhibition, displayed alongside other works of art in a museum hall, open to the public.
My book, The Missing Pages, is a biography of the Zeytun Gospels. Moved and fascinated by the fragment in Los Angeles, I set out to retrace its 700-year history. I wanted to capture not only the work’s moment of creation, not only the intention of the artist and the painterly tradition in which he worked, but the successive places where the manuscript found itself and the various roles it inhabited – prized possession, miraculous object, sacred relic, national treasure, coveted commodity and finally, work of art. I drew on recent debates in art history – on studies of mobility, of object agency, of “thingness” – but also on anthropological approaches to objects and their trajectories in social life.
What I found was that the history of the Zeytun Gospels, and how its Canon Tables came to be missing, unfolded the entire tragic history of the Armenian people in the 20th century. Indeed, the manuscript’s removal from the church where it functioned as a religious object and its separation from the Canon Tables took place during the First World War and the Armenian Genocide. The Zeytun Gospels shows the vulnerability of cultural heritage and its importance. It tells us the destruction of art is part and parcel of genocide, but also how central art is to survival, and what art can teach us about resilience. When I see Roslin’s illuminated pages, I marvel at their artistry, but I also feel the artwork’s defiant ability to endure, and against desperate odds, to bear witness to faith, to beauty, and to survival.
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She is the award-winning author of The Image of an Ottoman City: Architecture in Aleppo (2004). Her writing has also appeared in the Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
