Trier, City Library, Hs. 171/1626
Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 171/1626 and Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 171 / 1626a are the signatures of an incompletely preserved manuscript from the 10th century, of which a further single sheet under the signature Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 14 bis is preserved. The manuscript contained a copy of Pope Gregory the Great's collection of letters , the Registrum Gregorii . The illuminator of the two surviving miniatures, one of the most distinctive illuminators of his time, was therefore given the emergency name Meister des Registrum Gregorii or Gregormeister .
The handwriting
A total of four parts have been preserved from the original manuscript, presumably comprising more than 200 sheets:
- The Gregorblatt , which shows Pope Gregor (Trier, City Library, Hs. 171/1626);
- the Otto sheet showing the enthroned Emperor Otto II (Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 14 bis);
- the decorative pages of the text, a double sheet containing the title of the manuscript and a dedication poem (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. 171 / 1626a);
- a 37-sheet fragment of text (same signature as the Gregor sheet).
Based on the content of the dedication poem, the origin of the manuscript can be written down to after 983, as it laments the death of Otto II. The dedication poem reveals the person who commissioned the manuscript, Bishop Egbert von Trier , and the recipient of the manuscript, namely Trier Cathedral . According to the dedication poem, the manuscript also included a magnificent lid decorated with gold and gems , also from Egbert's foundation.
Little is known about the fate of the manuscript. An inventory of the Trier cathedral treasure from 1479 mentions the manuscript as an item as well as a silver book costly text vol costal Gesetyns and Perlin set with idel gold letters and an 'Incipit liber epistularum beati Gregorii'. When the manuscript was dismantled is not known; the text fragment was repaired and rebound in the 18th century.
The decorative text pages
The double sheet in the Trier City Library measures 37.5 × 29.5 cm. The parchment is much stronger than that of the other fragments, presumably as the cover sheet for the manuscript. It contains on folio 1 r the dedication poem Bishop Egbert, they are written in gold letters on purple ground:
Temporibus quondam tranquilla pace Serenis
Caesaris Ottonis Romana sceptra tenentis,
Italiae necnon Francorum iura Regentis
Hoc in Honore tuo scriptum, Petre sancte, volume
Auro contectum, gemmis pulcherrime comptum,
Ekbertus fieri iussit presul Trevirorum,
Magnifici fuerat qui compater imperatoris
Eius et in tota cunctis gratissimus aula,
Qui pater et patriam imperiali rexit honore,
Iusticiae cultor, qui pacis semper
amator Extitit et claris qui fulsit ubique triumphis.
Aurea quae perhibent, isto sub rege fuere
Saecula sic placida populos in pace regebat,
Deterior donec paulatim ac decolor aetas
Et belli rabies et amor successit habendi.
Sceptriger imperium qui postquam strenue rexit,
Decessit Romae tua ad atria, Petre, sepultus,
Vivat ut aetherei susceptus in atria regni.
On folio 1 v the written also with gold lettering on color stripes in green and purple title of the manuscript follows. Hartmut Hoffmann recognized the handwriting of the Gregor Master in the writing ( Capitalis rustica ) on the decorative pages. The dedication poem, written in hexameters , reveals that the poet was familiar with ancient literature, as it contains four lines from Virgil's Aeneid as a quotation (8, 324–327: from Aurea quae to successit habendi ). The reign of Otto II is thus equated with the Golden Age sung by Vergil . Carl Nordenfalk considers both Egbert himself and the Gregor Master to be possible authors of the dedication poem.
The Gregor paper
The Gregor sheet measures 26.5 × 19.5 cm and is trimmed at the edges. It shows a scene from a legend about the origin of the works of the Doctor of the Church Gregory. The scribe-deacon Peter, referred to as Notarius in an inscription above his head, drilled a hole in the curtain with the stylus when the Pope's dictation paused longer. Gregor, labeled GREGORIUS PP in the inscription above his head , sits enthroned in his room and listens to the inspiration from the dove of the Holy Spirit sitting on his shoulder. On the wax tablet held by the scribe, however, there is no quotation from the writings of Gregory, but a quotation from Jesus Sirach : Beatus vir qui in sapientia sua morabitur (Blessed is the man who persists in wisdom; Sir 14:22).
The intricately arranged layers of space as well as the monumental enthroned Pope show that the Gregory master understood spatial depth and plasticity, and characterize him as the greatest known artist of his time. At the same time, the picture is characterized by a majestic calm, which is created by the delicate, bright colors and the balanced composition. The painting was created over a preliminary drawing made by the Gregor Master himself, typical for this artist. The Gregor Master used silver pen as well as colored pen drawings next to each other and created his preliminary drawings in a very painterly way through the use of washes and modeling. Based on this preliminary drawing, he painted the miniature, although he deviated from the preliminary drawing in the spatial conception. The curtain that curves around the two pillars on the right of Gregory and thus gives the picture depth, corresponded to a curtain on the left of Gregory in the original design.
The single sheet with Pope Gregory, which is unwritten on the back, came from the hand of a collector to the Trier City Library in 1827.
The Otto sheet
The single sheet in Chantilly , the so-called Otto sheet, measures 27 × 19.8 cm and is trimmed at the edges of the sheet. The miniature shows an enthroned ruler who is identified as Otto Imperator August (us) in the inscription on the left and right of his head . Four female figures, who are identified by inscriptions above their heads as personifications of the provinces of Germania, Francia, Italia, and Alemannia , pay homage to him. The single sheet roughly corresponds to the size of the decorative text pages of the Registrum Gregorii with the dedication poem Egbert and the book title, so that the sheet probably comes from the same manuscript. This is also supported by the fact that the dedication poem laments the death of Emperor Otto II, so that Otto is identified as Otto II. According to another opinion, in the Emperor Otto III. to recognize. Against this view, however, speaks that Otto III. was only crowned emperor in 996, when Bishop Egbert, who commissioned the manuscript, had died three years ago.
Images of the emperors were not part of the usual set of images in manuscripts containing collections of letters and similar types of text. It is conceivable that Egbert had the miniature inserted into the imagery of the manuscript as a tribute to the deceased Otto II late in the creation process of the manuscript.
Figure style and image composition are typical of the Gregor Meister, who was based on ancient spatial representations. The figures are staggered in depth and, like the receding parts of the architecture and the throne, are also subject to the perspective of meaning , which makes the emperor appear all the more prominent. This picture structure shaped the style of the rulers' pictures of the Reichenau School of Illumination , which were created a little later.
The Ottoblatt was acquired in 1862 by a French nobleman in the art trade in London, and so ended up in the Musée Condé . Since it is mounted on cardboard, it is not known whether there is writing on the back.
Gregorblatt and Ottoblatt were originally two opposite pages of the manuscript. The quote from Jesus-Sirach in the Gregor paper also referred to the emperor. In the two pictures the Gregory Master received a miniature from a Byzantine Bible, the Niketas Bible (Copenhagen, Gl. Kongl. Saml. 6). There is on fol. 83 a miniature in which the enthroned King Solomon is shown in conversation with Jesus Sirach, who is seated on the left in front of him. With the same structure, the Gregor Master replaced Jesus Sirach with Gregor and Solomon with Otto, who was characteristically referred to as “Salomo revivus” by Hrotsvit von Gandersheim in the prologue of Gesta Ottonis .
The Trier text fragment
The text fragment from a Registrum Gregorii of the Trier City Library comprises 37 sheets in the format 35 × 28.5 cm. Based on the format, content and origin from the Trier cathedral library, which is evidenced by a paper certificate used for the repair, it is assumed that the fragment belonged to the same manuscript as the decorative text pages and the individual sheets. According to Hartmut Hoffmann, the writers of the text come from the island of Reichenau; Carl Nordenfalk described the fragment as a carefully written library manuscript. The text was subsequently provided with small initials in gold, silver, vermilion and lead, which, due to the poor quality, did not come from the Gregor master. An appearance by Reichenauer Schreiber does not speak against belonging to the other fragments, which are undoubtedly Trier origin, since Reichenauer and Trier Schreiber and artist also work together in the Codex Egberti , which was created around the same time .
The text fragment came to the Trier City Library in 1814 through Johann Hugo Wyttenbach .
According to Paul Ewald's investigations , the fragment, designated by him as R 2, belongs to the manuscript group R, which can be traced back to the copy made under Hadrian I with 686 letters from the original register. The order of the leaves is no longer the original. Evidence such as the remains of a quaternion count led him to the assumption that the Trier manuscript was 256 pages long. However, according to an entry from the 12th century, only 662 letters appear to have been available at the time. In terms of the text and its arrangement, the Trier fragment is close to the R 1 manuscript ( Cod. Cas. 71 in Montecassino ), but has fewer orthographic peculiarities.
literature
- Hartmut Hoffmann: Book art and royalty in the Ottonian and early Salian empires . Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-7772-8640-0 (Writings of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica , Vol. 30)
- Carl Nordenfalk: Archbishop Egbert's 'Registrum Gregorii'. In: Katharina Bierbrauer (ed.): Studies on medieval art 800-1250. Festschrift for Florentine Mütherich on her 70th birthday . Munich 1985.
- Franz J. Ronig (Ed.): Egbert. Archbishop of Trier 977–993. Commemorative writing of the Diocese of Trier on the 1000th anniversary of death . Self-published by the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, Trier 1993, ISBN 3-923319-27-4 ( Trier magazine for the history and art of the Trier region and its neighboring areas. Supplement 18).
Remarks
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 87.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, No. 6.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, No. 6.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, no. 9.
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 88.
- ^ Karl Strecker and others: The Latin poets of the German Middle Ages. Fifth Volume: The Ottonian Era . 1937-1979, p. 429. Also with errors in: Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977-993) , catalog of the exhibition Trier 1993, No. 6, a translation into German can be found in Franz Ronig, Archbishop Egbert von Trier (977-993), Trier Theologische Zeitschrift 1994, p. 83f.
- ↑ Hoffmann, Buchkunst und Königum, p. 489.
- ^ Ronig, Archbishop Egbert von Trier (977–993), Trier Theologische Zeitschrift, p. 83.
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 87.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, no. 7.
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 90.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, No. 8.
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 99.
- ↑ Nordenfalk, p. 99f.
- ↑ Egbert. Archbishop of Trier (977–993), catalog of the Trier exhibition 1993, no. 9.
- ^ Paul Ewald: Studies on the output of the Gregors I register. In: New archive of the Society for Older German History 3, 1878, pp. 451–625, here pp. 449–450. Like other codices with Gregor's register, the manuscript had been sent to him for examination in Berlin.
- ↑ Ewald: Studies p. 450; on p. 459 note 2 he tries to reconstruct the original arrangement of the leaves.
