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Prolović Jadranka, The Illuminated Serbian Gospel of Sinai (Cod. Sinait. slav. 1)
The illuminated Serbian Gospel (Cod. sinait. slav. 1) — a parchment manuscript decorated with miniatures and initials, and kept in the Monastery St. Catharine’s at Sinai — has gone almost unnoticed. Of the four miniatures of evangelists which one traveller reported seeing in the manuscript in 1925, today there remains only a portrait of the Evangelist Mathew (л. 3v), as well as four floral-entangled initials adorning the beginning of the text of each Gospel. The codex contains parts of a metal mount which feature five relief metal icons containing the depiction of the Koimesis of the Mother of God accompanied by the figures of the Evangelists that decorate its front cover.
This study shows that this Serbian manuscript in Sinai is a product of a writing activity of the Patriarchate of Peć, that was written and embellished with miniatures around 1322-1324 in Peć, probably as a commission of Archbishop Nikodim. Moreover, it reveals that the same, though today unknown, scribe wrote the “Oktoihos pentagon” (Октоих петогласник) which is still held in the manuscript collection of the Patriarchate of Peć (Peć 62), and a serbian Gospelbook from Mounth Athos monastery Dochiariou (Cod. 424). That this calligrapher is very close to the scribe of the first five pages of the so-called “Šišatovački apostol” (Acts of the Apostles of Šišatovac), found in the manuscript collection of the library of the Patriarchate of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Belgrade. The colophon of the scribe Damjan, who penned the rest of the pages of Acts of the Apostles of Šišatovac, tells us that it was carried out in Peć in 1324, which confirms the dating and determination of the place of origin of the Sinai Serbian manuscript.
This paper demonstrates that the manuscript´s miniature is the work of one of the painters who was commissioned by the archbishop Nikodim to decorate with frescoes his endownment, the church of Holy Demetrios, in the monastery complex of the Patriarchate of Peć. The signature of one of these painters, “Ioannis”, is found in the apse of the church, however, the miniature can be considered to have been executed by one of his anonymous associates whose artistic style is also recognized on the frescoes. This does not exclude the possibility that Ioannis created another now-lost miniature in this manuscript. Since the fresco decoration of the church St. Demetrios is dated between 1322 and 1324, it can be concluded that the codex was executed during the same period. Parallels for the remaining miniature in this manuscript are found in a series of codices with Constantinopolitan provenance, which are dated to the last dacade of the 13th century and first decade of the 14th century. The initials of the Sinai manuscript can be attributed to a not-as-skillful assistant of these painters, who also followed a so-called “Neo-Byzantine style” characteristic for the splendid manuscripts of Constantinople, and repeat models of manuscript decorations created already in the 10th century. This embellishment appears in Serbian manuscripts even around the half of the 14th century.
The binding of the Sinai manuscript is a rarity in Serbian medieval art, as it is the only preserved mount of a Serbian codex of that period. It is possible that these icons found secondary use when binding the manuscript with red brocade, probably in the 15th century, but it is also possible that the same metal icons were part of the original binding of this manuscript. The artist who made the five icons fixed on the front cover of this manuscript was trained in an older tradition of metalworking, and a number of parallels from the 12th century indicate that these metal ornaments probably originated during that period or in the 13th century. The metal cover and brocade binding of this Sinai manuscript will be the subject of special studies investigating the circumstances related to their origins.
The relatively large dimensions of the manuscript, its ornamentation with miniatures, the symbolic red colour of the binding, which was generally reserved for the emperors, and its embellishment with metal icons indicate that this book was intended as a valuable gift for some monastery in Palestine or Sinai, аnd possibly served as a liturgical tetraevangelium placed on the altar. One possibility is the monastery of the Holy Archangels in Jerusalem, an endowment of Milutin and a lavra of Serbian Metochia in the Holy Land, which was assuredly equipped with church necessities at the time of the manuscript’s production and had its own history on Sinai. On the other hand, the central carved representation of the Koimesis of the Mother of God on the cover of the manuscript (otherwise unusual for the cover of a tetraevangelium) suggests the possibility that the codex was intended for a monastery dedicated to the Mother of God, at that time the catholicon of the St. Catherine´s Monastery and Kalomon Monastery in the Jordan desert, which served as a stopover for worshipers to Sinai and whose benefactor was St. Sava; it is therefore plausible that Serbians kept supporting and donating to it. Though this question must remain open, it is likely that this illuminated Serbian Gospel was preserved in some metochion of Sinai monastery, unknown to us today and in which presumably Serbian monks lived, till the beginning of the 20th century when it, along with other old manuscripts, was transferred to the monastic library.
