A Byzantine Illuminated Manuscript of the Palaeologue Epoch in Moscow

Abstract

Although we have many illuminated manuscripts of the mid-Byzantine period, hardly any miniatures of the Palaeologue epoch have come down to us.¹ That is the reason that up to the present historians of Byzantine miniature painting have assumed that at this epoch, celebrated for its icons and its mosaic and fresco cycles, the art of miniature painting passed through a decline.² Most libraries have until very recently followed the old dating of illuminated manuscripts, based on the mistaken ideas of the old historians—Kondakoff and others—who ascribed everything exceptional in Byzantine miniatures to the Macedonian dynasty and the epoch of the Comnens. Critical examination of the old dating has hardly ever been undertaken; hence a distortion of the historical perspective has resulted.