The Miniatures of the Florence Diatessaron (Laurentian ms Or. 81): Their Place in Late Medieval Art and Supposed Connection with Early Christian and Insular Art

Abstract

In an article on the Persian manuscript of Tatian's Diatessaron in Florence (The Art Bulletin, l, 1968, 119–140), Carl Nordenfalk draws two conclusions which, if true, would radically affect certain of our ideas about the beginnings of both Early Christian and medieval art. He believes that the four decorated pages at the end of this codex, made for an Armenian bishop in 1547, preserve the types and even detailed forms of the ornament and pictures in a Greek manuscript produced in Rome about a.d. 170 under Tatian's eyes (Figs. 1–4). They are then an evidence of the character of Christian art fifty years before the oldest surviving examples of Christian painting and sculpture. In the second place, the decoration and images of the Tatian manuscript in Florence appear to Nordenfalk so similar to the ornament and figures in the earliest Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts – the Books of Durrow, Echternach, Kells and others – that the genesis and certain peculiarities of that insular art – so isolated among the works of their time – can be explained by the copying of a Diatessaron manuscript like the archetype of the Florence codex. “Insular illumination,” he writes, “rested mainly on one pillar: a copy of an illustrated edition of Tatian's Diatessaron” (page 140).