Evangelica Historia Facsimile Edition

Eighty parchment leaves are all that survive of the Evangelica Historia, held in Milan at the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana as MS L 58 sup. Copied in Italy in the second half of the fourteenth century, the codex has lost its opening leaves, and its Latin narrative now begins in mid-course.

Canonical Gospel and Apocryphal Legend in Trecento Italy

Its compiler worked from the canonical Gospels and from the noncanonical literature that circulated beside them, drawing on the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew for the infancy of Mary and of Jesus and closing the volume with the apocryphal Mors Pilati. The boundary that later scholarship would police between scripture and legend mattered little to readers who wanted the story whole. By the fifteenth century the book stood in the library of the Visconti and Sforza dukes at Pavia.

Pen and Ink Above a Two-Column Text

The Latin runs in two columns, and drawings in pen and ink, rather than painting in body color and gold, occupy the space above it. The technique keeps the figures quick and light, and it exposes a draftsman's hand in a way that burnished miniatures rarely do. No artist has been identified.

A Narrative Followed Picture by Picture

Word and image advance together down the volume, so that the compilation can be taken in by looking as much as by reading. Such a structure seems built for slow and repeated use rather than for a single passage through the text.

Strip the drawings away and what remains is one Latin life of Christ among many. With them, it becomes a way of seeing the story.