The tsar between the pages

A book made for a Bulgarian tsar survives in London. Open it and, before the Gospel narrative, his family faces you: crowns, red robes, names above their heads. What does this court want us to see?

The manuscript was made in 1355–1356 for Ivan Alexander. It is a Gospel book containing all four Gospels. Today the British Library holds it as Add MS 39627. This is the surviving object, rather than a modern album of selected pictures. To understand the portrait, first look at how the book was made. The trail begins with a name left by the person who copied its text.

The scribe was the monk Simeon. His colophon near the end records the book’s completion in 1356. He wrote on parchment in Cyrillic letters. The painters remain anonymous; the scribe’s name should not automatically become the name of the illuminator.

Tarnovo, the tsar’s capital, is a probable place of production. It is not certain: scholar Lilyana Yordanova also proposes an Athonite connection through similarities to Hilandar manuscripts. We cannot mark a particular workshop on a map. We can see the work on the leaf itself: the broad coloured headpiece above the opening of Mark’s Gospel, and the closely written lines beneath it.

In 1876 the Curzon collection was deposited on permanent loan at the British Museum. In 1917 his daughter Darea, Baroness Zouche, bequeathed the manuscript to the museum. It entered the British Library in 1973.

The photograph shows the upper cover of the surviving binding. It does not show the lost gilded metalwork described in the colophon. Even the surviving object has losses. Yet the family portrait still places the tsar among his relatives, and the miniature with Luke places him in a devotional image. The book allows us to interpret how the court presented its authority. We cannot trace every movement of the book; we can distinguish marks on the leaf from the explanations we offer today.