In 1996 the Austrian Academy of Sciences performed an immense service to the scholarly world by reprinting Kurt Weitzmann's Die byzantinische Buchmalerei des 9. und 10. Jahrhunderts and simultaneously issuing a second volume with Weitzmann's comments and additions. This study of illumination during the centuries following Iconoclasm is among Weitzmann's earliest works, conceived and written principally from original sources at a time when the political climate in Germany had begun to turn against men and women of liberal outlook. In 1926 Weitzmann traveled to Berlin to study art history. There he was attracted to the seminars given by Adolph Goldschmidt, whose wide-ranging interests included medieval ivory carving. It was Goldschmidt who assigned Weitzmann the Byzantine ivory caskets as a Ph.D. thesis, a work that was finished in 1929 and published, in 1930, as the fifth volume of Goldschmidt's ivory corpus. In the year the casket volume appeared, Goldschmidt and Weitzmann began a collaboration on the second volume of Byzantine ivories, dedicated to the single plaques, diptychs, triptychs and a few miscellaneous pieces (Berlin, 1934). The degree to which the findings of Die byzantinischen Elfenbeinskulpturen des X.-XIII. Jahrhunderts have remained current testifies to the rigor of Goldschmidt's connoisseurship, which was founded on the thorough collection of materials, first-hand study of the objects, the ability to exploit provenance, and a deep sensitivity to style. In studying the ivories with Goldschmidt, Weitzmann came to recognize the scarcity of dated specimens as an obstacle to organizing the material effectively, which meant first establishing a satisfactory chronology, a problem that remains basic to our study of Byzantine sculpture. As a remedy, Weitzmann undertook a synthetic study of Byzantine illumination for the period in which the majority of the ivories had been produced.
Beginning in 1931 Weitzmann traveled extensively, visiting libraries throughout Europe to examine Byzantine manuscripts. From Goldschmidt he had learned the value of the photograph collection. Weitzmann traveled with his Leica and was able to take advantage of open policies to assemble an enormous study collection of first-rate photographs. As he wrote in his memoirs, Sailing with Byzantium from Europe to America (on which these remarks are partly based), Weitzmann made the acquaintance of most of the leading scholars of his day, many of whom, like Linos Polites, who instructed him in the basics of Greek palaeography, enthusiastically supported the effort to collect and study manuscripts. During the period from 1931 to 1934, Weitzmann co-edited the Archaeologisches Jahrbuch and co-authored the second volume of Byzantine ivories as he worked on Byzantinische Buchmalerei, which he hoped would secure him a teaching position at a German university. With the intervention of Theodore Wiegand of the Kaiser- Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, the book was published in 1935. It appeared in the series issued under the auspices of the German Archaeological Institute, though in a limited number of copies that sold quickly (the colleges and universities of Washington, D.C., record only one original in their combined holdings). Owing to his liberal views and association with Adolph Goldschmidt, dismissed from the Berlin faculty for being a Jew, Weitzmann was unable to secure a full-time appointment in Germany. An invitation from Princeton University allowed him to continue the study of Byzantine art, in particular Byzantine manuscript illumination.
An appreciation of what Weitzmann achieved in Byzantinische Buchmalerei begins with a survey of the footnotes and an understanding of the state of scholarship in the early 1930s. The number of articles dealing with either the style or illustrative content of individual manuscripts was extremely small, virtually insignificant in number, and of the sets of illustrations which we now take for granted only that of Henri Omont for the Bibliotheque Nationale was then available; Gabriel Millet's 1916 study of Byzantine Gospel illustration did contain a large number of reproductions, but ones covering a wide period of time and drawn from all media. Monographic treatments of Byzantine painting had begun appearing in the late nineteenth century (N. Kondakov, J. Tikkanen), although they had few reproductions suitable to connoisseurship issues. It was the studies by Charles Diehl, Hans Gerstinger and Jean Ebersolt, which appeared in the 1920s, that established a foundation on which Weitzmann could draw (see the bibliography, p. ix). His, though, was a far more concentrated effort at assembling and sorting material produced over a limited period and in unknown centers. Throughout Byzantinische Buchmalerei library catalogues comprise the greatest group of cited works, as quiet testimony to Weitzmann's tireless efforts in examining every relevant book and making its evidence available; it was mainly the library of St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai that remained unknown to him in the 1930s. In all about 235 individual manuscripts are discussed. In the study of Byzantine art history, I can think of no comparable work in which so much scattered material, much of it hitherto unknown and with no internal evidence for guidance, is collected, sifted and grouped in a reasonable fashion. Johann Tikkanen's work on the Psalters and Gabriel Millet's on the Gospels may be the only forerunners.
Weitzmann's study opens with a work produced during Iconoclasm, the Vatican Ptolemy (Vat. gr. 1291) and ends well after the close of the tenth century; the latest work discussed is dated 1069 (Marc. gr. II.114). The period he chose to write about proved to be one of the most creative in Byzantine history. It was during the ninth and tenth centuries that scribes adopted cursive writing as a book hand, and did so in a wide variety of styles, some never again matched for their calligraphic excellence. Scribes and illuminators of the period expanded upon the decorative vocabulary of the early Middle Ages and produced initials and title frames in a great number of designs, including ones drawn from the decorative repertories of other media, particularly metalwork. In his efforts to date and group manuscripts, Weitzmann paid unprecedented attention to the ornament and included nearly a hundred line drawings of initials and title frames to supplement the slightly over six- hundred leaves reproduced from photographs. Although the fifth and sixth centuries have been recognized as the period when the book first took on the identity of art object, it was the tenth century that saw manuscripts without illustration, including belletristic writings, copied and decorated with surpassing elegance. Ninth- and tenth-century illuminators created illustrations intended to teach lessons in theology (Paris. gr. 510) and history (Marginal Psalters) and to offer moral (Job manuscripts), ethical (Paris. gr. 129) and historical (Vat. pal. gr. 431) allegories. Given the scope of his chosen topic, it was Weitzmann's decision to concentrate on dating and localization rather than to explore the significance of the subject matter, and in the end the links with ivory carving were never explored.
In a brief text of fewer than one-hundred pages, Weitzmann discusses a range of centers of production in the Greek- speaking world. He begins with books written and illuminated in Constantinople (pp. 2-34) and devotes subsections to groups arranged around significant works like the Paris Gregory (gr. 510) and Paris Psalter (gr. 139), ones that contain distinctive decoration, like the manuscripts with Blue-Gold and Jigsaw ornament; in one important section (pp. 32-43) he turns to copies of ancient manuscripts. We now take for granted the tenth-century dates for the Paris Psalter and Joshua Roll (Vat. pal. gr. 431), but it was the careful accumulation of supporting evidence that permitted Weitzmann to establish their dates beyond any reasonable doubt. In subsequent chapters he reviews illumination on Mt. Athos (pp. 34-39) and in centers in Asia Minor (pp. 39-71), Palestine (pp. 72-76) and Italy (pp. 82-88). As Weitzmann later came to realize, some of his attributions were made on the basis of weak or questionable documentation. The early Marginal Psalters (pp. 53-57) are one example. In 1935 Weitzmann considered their style to be unlike anything known from Constantinople. On account of similarities with Syrian painting, he proposed an origin in Asia Minor, which we now know to be unlikely because the rubrics in the Chludov Psalter (Mosq. gr. 129) point to the book's use in Constantinople. Yet in the course of his discussion of the three psalters, Weitzmann offers cogent arguments for relative chronology and finds important parallels in the Job manuscript on Patmos (cod. 171), a copy of Photios's Amphilochia on Athos (Lavra 449) and a set of portraits bound into a Gospel book now in Princeton (Garrett 6). With the sole exception of some miniatures rebound in a manuscript of the Metamorphosis monastery at Meteora (cod. 106), published in the late 1960s, everything the student or scholar needs to work on the style of the psalter illustrations has been gathered and logically presented. These are the strengths of Byzantinische Buchmalerei, its author's knowledge of the manuscripts, sound stylistic judgments, and clarity of expression. Like his written English, Weitzmann's German is straightforward, free of jargon and imprecision. The student with an undergraduate knowledge of German and a dictionary could read this book without much difficulty.
In the two volumes of this new edition, the first is an exact copy of the original, to which have been added new title pages and forewords by Hermann Filitz and Weitzmann. The text is reproduced crisply at a level of quality unusual in contemporary reissues. Unfortunately, the plates are heavily inked; in both the review copy and the one at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library the reproductions were noticeably darker than those of the 1935 edition. For a book concerned with distinctions of style, this is a drawback. The second volume, subtitled "Addenda und Appendix," contains a short introduction and list of abbreviated sources, followed by a series of more or less brief comments keyed to pages in the first (original) volume; finally there are two indices for the added material and 110 new illustrations. The purpose of the second volume was to allow the author to include new bibliography, supplement the groupings with discoveries made since 1935, and to express fresh or revised opinions on the manuscripts. Although Byzantinische Buchmalerei is a masterwork of art history that remains a fundamental source, the Addenda inspire ambivalence. Weitzmann was not a thorough bibliographer and tended to give inordinate weight to his own writings, even when their relevance to the issue at hand may have been tangential. Given how little had been written when he set out to research and write this book in 1931, his inclination had no effect on the utility of the study. But the student who expects the added comments to bridge the sixty-year gap between publication dates will not be well served by this second volume. When Weitzmann returns to the question of the Marginal Psalters and related works (pp. 51-54), he makes no reference to the writings of the historians, philologists and musicologists that require the reattribution of the psalters to Constantinople or that bear on the date and provenance of the Lavra Amphilochia. One is, nevertheless, grateful to have the added illustrations and Weitzmann's latest observations on illumination during this formative period. The Austrian Academy has allowed this classic work to have the circulation it always deserved.