Several of the most common gestures in Armenian manuscripts in the Biti Library and their narrative functions
Among the extensive collections of the Chester Beatty Manuscript Library in Dublin, Ireland is a small but selected collection of Armenian manuscripts. Sirarpie Der Nersessian, one of the best Armenian manuscript researchers of the 20th century, published the first catalogue of Armenian manuscripts in the Biti Library in 1958. Her catalogue includes 67 manuscripts with serial numbers CBLArm551 to CBLArm617. During the cataloguing process, Nersysyan placed the Armenian manuscripts in the Biti Library in the context of the entire history of the evolution of Armenian manuscripts, trying to identify each illustrator and his style, symbolism, teacher, writing room, etc.
This cataloguing of 67 manuscripts is enough to become an important work in the history of Armenian manuscript painting, largely because of the quality of the Armenian manuscript collection of the Bithi Library. After the publication of the first catalog, the Biti Library continued to house 21 Armenian manuscripts, both complete and fragmentary, in addition to two extremely precious silver-encrusted caselets and several precious books of early Armenian printing. The entire collection of Armenian manuscripts was compiled between the 12th and 19th centuries, and a complete catalogue was published in 2015. The two catalogers this time are also Armenian scholars: Michael Stone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his wife, Stone Stone.
In the introduction to the catalog, Stone compares the Bitte Library collection with the collection of the manuscript library in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, and the manuscript library collection in the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, noting that the collection of the Bitte Library consists mainly of manuscripts with decorative paintings. With the exception of a very small number of The Elder Scrolls, most of the Armenian manuscripts in the Bitti Library have different forms of decoration and illustration, so the criterion for the library's collection of Armenian manuscripts lies mainly in the quality of the manuscript illustrations.
Therefore, a considerable part of the manuscripts in the collection are from the period of the Kingdom of Cilicia in the 13th-14th centuries, which was also the heyday of Armenian medieval manuscript compilation; Most of the manuscripts in the collection date from the 16th and 17th centuries, when the European Renaissance had a great influence on Armenian art. The first two 12th-century manuscripts in the collection come from Edessa and Antioch, both of which were the seat of the Crusader states. There are also manuscripts compiled in Constantinople and Jerusalem during the same period. The collection of 12th-14th century manuscripts was mainly compiled or copied in the Kingdom of Silesia, while the collection of 16th-17th century manuscripts was mainly produced in the New Jiaofa Armenian Cultural Area of Constantinople and Isfahan.
The collection of Armenian manuscripts in the Bitte Library comes from a specific historical and geographical scope, and this collection can be said to be representative of manuscripts produced by Armenian cultural centers in Western Armenia and in Iran and Turkey, covering basically the styles adopted by medieval and later writing rooms and painters in these regions. However, the collection of the Biti Library is weak in presenting the eastern and northern manuscript art of the same period, and does not contain any manuscripts produced by Armenian art centers in present-day Georgia, Crimea, and Poland.
The largest proportion of Armenian manuscripts in the Biti Library collection is the New Testament Gospels (42 of which are manuscripts) and are largely complete, which is an unusually high proportion in the general Gospel manuscript collection. The second largest is hymns (6), which also includes a complete Bible and scattered biblical volumes, including the Acts and Psalms, the church almanac (the Calendar of the Saints), the liturgical law, and the early scrolls.
What exactly is the iconographic style peculiar to Armenian manuscripts? It is recognized that this is a very difficult problem. This is partly due to the geographical fragmentation of the Armenian manuscript production centers: not only the great Armenia was cut off by the valleys, but also the Armenian kingdom of Silesia, which was far away, and the diaspora Armenian communities throughout Europe and Central Asia (such as the manuscript workshops in Crimea, Constantinople and Isfahan mentioned above) have developed a homogeneous but alien pictorial style over the long history.
On the other hand, there is the discontinuity of Armenian culture itself, caused by the combination of continuous foreign domination and influence, as well as the aforementioned geographical fragmentation. The stylistic roots of Armenian painting are panhellenistic, more precisely rooted in the fusion of indigenous art and Byzantine Christian iconographic traditions, but influenced by Islamic art and even more distant oriental art styles due to the invasion and occupation of foreign peoples such as Persians, Arabs, Turks and Mongols at different times. The former is particularly prominent in the Armenian Gospels produced in the New Jiaofa region of Isfahan (from which a considerable part of the Biti Library's manuscript collection comes from), mainly in the use of intricate geometric tiles and carpet patterns in the Islamic style to decorate the Gospel comparison table and the background of the picture.
