Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

in Hagia Sophia, seat of the patriarch of Constantinople
and the central church of the Orthodox Catholic Church. It
is illustrated with 296 coloured miniatures decorated with
gold; a monk named Gligorije is mentioned in the book as
the illuminator of the miniatures.
The Gospel is written in the old Slavic language and
proved highly influential in the development of the Cyrillic
alphabet whose use spread across the Central and Eastern
Balkans in the medieval period.
Serbia’s geographic position meant the country was well
placed to absorb cultural influences from both East and
West, and this too is evident in the Gospel, which used
a radical new blend of artistic and decorative styles from
Byzantium and Italy. Elaborate initial letters were the main
decorative devices in Eastern manuscripts, and miniature
illustrations covering the page were rare. However, this
style of miniature illustration painting was the preferred
method of decoration in the scriptoria of Central Italy.
The Miroslav Gospel used both, and this new fusion
influenced the development of manuscript illumination
in the region into the 15th century.
Art historians have traced mutual Eastern and Western
influences in the ornamentation, with Byzantine and
Roman influences alongside techniques from Syrian,
Bithynian, Coptic and other Western styles.
By the mid-19th century the Gospel was in the library
of Hilandar, the Serbian monastery on Mount Athos in
Greece. Unusually, a page of the book (folio 166) was
taken by a visiting Russian churchman: he took it to
St. Petersburg where it is still kept in the National Library
of Russia. The rest of the Gospel was given to the Serbian
king some years later and its fate was at times precarious
during the regional upheavals of the 20th century.
After the Second World War it was transferred into the
keeping of the Arts Museum, now the National Museum
in Belgrade.
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