The oldest manuscript is one of the most precious—and celebrated—treasures of the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana’s rich book collection, and, more generally, one of the rarest and most remarkable testimonies to survive from the so-called late-antique period. The manuscript currently bears the shelfmark F 205 inf., but it is commonly known as the Ilias Picta. Despite extensive interdisciplinary study (philology, paleography, art history, etc.), particularly since the nineteenth century, it remains enigmatic in many respects. Numerous questions still lack definitive answers, foremost among them the place of production, the dating, and, in part, the manuscript’s historical vicissitudes.

In fact, it is a relic of a once much larger codex, presumably produced in the early sixth century, now entirely fragmented. The manuscript currently consists of fifty-two cuttings with miniatures depicting Iliadic scenes; on the verso, these leaves preserve fragments of the poem in splendid ancient majuscule, following the canon of the round majuscule whose apogee occurred in the first century CE. According to the latest hypotheses proposed by Guglielmo Cavallo, the manuscript’s place of production was Alexandria, Egypt (see details in the catalog entry). The original exegetical paratext, in this case, is constituted by the rich iconographic apparatus: it is estimated that the original manuscript contained approximately two hundred miniatures, alongside a complete text of the Iliad, presented in a sumptuous format, likely exceptional even for its time. The manuscript, however, led a dynamic life and underwent a peculiar mode of reading. At an as-yet unspecified date, it was dismantled and cut, later being reused in the Italo-Greek area in the twelfth century, probably in a scriptorium in Calabria, where it was transformed into a small schoolbook. During this phase, the miniatures were accompanied by captions in red ink, and ‘adventitious’ paper margins were added to include essentially the scholia of the so-called Class D, arranged in an apparently bizarre layout that, nonetheless, suited practical and didactic purposes (see catalog entries and plates).

The Class of D scholia and twelfth-century southern Italy thus guide us, along one of the possible pathways of this exhibition, to two other Homeric manuscripts. We arrive in the second half of the thirteenth century in the two most culturally active Greek-speaking regions of the period: the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople (A 181 sup.), and the Terra d’Otranto (L 116 sup.). A new phase of ‘Renaissance’ characterized Constantinople and a few other centers of the Greek East (notably Thessaloniki), this time limited to intellectual production, as the Byzantine Empire — geographically reduced to narrow borders — was already experiencing the structural weaknesses that would lead to its fall in 1453. This period is known as the ‘Palaeologan Renaissance’ named after the ruling dynasty.  Concurrently, southern Apulia — maintaining constant dialogue with the major centers of the Eastern Roman Empire — was the site of the last phase of ‘identity preservation’ by Greek-speaking and Greek-rite communities in Italy, resisting the gradual Latinization of religious, cultural, and linguistic practices. In the Terra d’Otranto, less than two centuries saw an intense scholastic and erudite engagement with classical secular texts.

The two manuscripts on display preserve the text of the Iliad accompanied by approximately the same category of scholia, but the graphic execution and arrangement of the material are markedly different. In the Constantinopolitan manuscript, one can appreciate the elegant mise en page: the Homeric text, arranged in two columns, is ‘framed’ by dense marginal scholia in Kranzform, particularly in the early books, yet always balanced in terms of spacing and regularity of module. In contrast, in the Salentine codex, the text of the Iliad is accompanied by the Paraphrase, with most of the exegetical material placed at the end of each canto (à recueil), while the margins or interlinear spaces of the Homeric text contain mainly brief glossographic notes. Note also the exuberant, ‘baroque’ handwriting, reflecting a graphic fashion typical of thirteenth-century Greek Salento, and the vivid chromatic richness of the decoration.