Abstract

The Library of the University of Liege (Université de Liège. Bibliothèque, Ms. 2613) and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Victoria and Albert Museum, Ms. 413) have two leaves created c. 1150–1170 and produced in the Meuse region. Although the question of the purpose of the leaves is under discussion, these two oeuvres of Romanesque book illumination have not yet received special scholarly attention. The leaves have a similar layout: each side contains two compositions based on stories from the Book of Genesis, and there are no inscriptions or biblical quotations. The Old Testament episodes included in the pictorial program of the leaves do not form a consistent narrative cycle. Thus, the scenes of the sacrifice by Cain and Abel and the murder of Abel by Cain in the leaf from the Victoria and Albert Museum are followed by an episode of the meeting of Abraham and Melchizedek. The leaf from Liège begins with the scene of the sacrifice of Isaac. The cycle does not contain a number of scenes with a fairly consistent iconographic tradition (for example, the story of Noah). Such narrative heterogeneity can be interpreted through the prism of the purpose of the pictorial series. The Sacrifice of Abel, the Gifts of Melchizedek and the Sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham are mentioned in the Eucharistic Canon of the Sacramentary of Pope Gelasius I and have been used in iconographic programs since the era of early Christianity as the main liturgical prototypes. The back of the leaf from the Library of the University of Liege contains another subject which alludes to the typological parallelism of the Testaments – the Blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh by Jacob. The designated subjects can be found in a number of contemporaneous works of decorative and applied arts and book miniatures of the Rhine-Meuse region, which are compiled on the basis of typological logic in the arrangement of stories. The selection of stories, as well as the stylistic and iconographic analysis of the range of oeuvres with typological iconography, suggests that the leaves could have been fragments of a model book and probably served as models in the process of the spreading of the compositional and iconographic techniques which were characteristic of the Rhine-Meuse region

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