Description

Original bdg. HC. Oblong 4to. (22 x 30 cm). In English and Romanian. 115, [140] p., fully color ills. Byzantine manuscripts in Bucharest's collections.= Manuscrise bizantine în colectii bucurestene. Project coordinator: Ileana Stanculescu. From the first article: "From the photographs taken over time, we chose those which best capture a special artistic quality with their strictly documentary value. This selection of manuscripts ends before the dawn of the 16th century, given the common view that after the fall of Constantinople (1453) we can no longer speak of a truly Byzantine culture, but only of a Byzantine style, albeit one which continued to shine. The selection of images was also intended to emphasize not only the aesthetics of the illuminated folios, but also those details that are significant for the codices as a whole, things which would dryly translate today as typeface font type, page layout and binding. Far from the sight of all interested parties, the Byzantine manuscripts in the Bucharest repositories are still full of mysteries waiting to be discovered and explained by researchers. We present these images here to provide a platform for a wider discussion of the significance of the Byzantine legacy for Romanian pre-modern culture. For the identification and description of the items chosen we used several catalogues, either manuscript or in print, which we then compared with the corresponding labels used by the repositories. The bibliography at the end of the volume indicates the various catalogues used for each collection. We found a wealth of details pertaining to the manuscript collections of the Romanian Patriarchy in the album published by the archimandrite Policarp. This is an excellent occasion to thank the specialists involved in the inventory of the collection for the additional information they supplied. We extend our warmest gratitude to them.Here and there we updated and corrected the information found in the aforementioned sources in the light of recent research: the dating of ms. sl. II 280, from the Library of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church at the Antim Monastery. We thank Mrs Tatiana Popova (University of St. Petersburg in Severodvinsk), for the observation that we are dealing with a direct copy, made at the end of the 14th century, of the Russian metropolitan Kyprian's reworking (dated 1385) of the Ladder of John Climax. Ms. sl. II 280 belongs to a group of manuscripts kept at Antim Monastery, but originates from a collection in Slava Rusa, a settlement in Dobrogea and a known.".