Vergilius Romanus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vergilius Romanus is a manuscript that has sat in the Vatican's Biblioteca Apostolica for centuries, shelved under the call number Cod. Vat. lat. 3867. It is a 5th-century illustrated book of Virgil's poetry, and it is among the oldest copies of those works that still exist. Its 309 vellum folios hold the Aeneid, the Georgics, and portions of the Eclogues. What makes this manuscript extraordinary, though, is not simply its age. Its nineteen surviving illustrations offer a rare window into a precise moment when artists were beginning to move away from the classical tradition. Who painted those pictures? Where was this book made? And what do its pages tell us about how the ancient world's image of the human body was slowly dissolving?

• 2. The Physical Object

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  Each page of the Vergilius Romanus measures 332 by 323 millimetres, making it a roughly square object, unusually compact for a manuscript of such scope. The text runs in rustic capitals at eighteen lines per page. Rustic capitals were a formal script used for prestigious literary texts in late antiquity. The writing was set onto vellum, prepared animal skin, which was far more durable than the papyrus rolls that had carried Virgil's poems in earlier centuries. The transition from roll to codex was still relatively recent when this manuscript was made. The Vergilius Romanus preserves traces of that older roll tradition in unexpected places, particularly in the framing choices made by its illustrators.

• 3. Two Artists, Two Visions

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  Folio 1 recto, the very first illustrated page, belongs to a single miniature painted by the first of the two anonymous artists. It depicts a scene from the First Eclogue: a cowherd named Tityrus sits under a tree playing a flute, while three cows peer out from behind the trunk. Across the scene, a standing goatherd named Meliboeus leads a goat by its horns, with more goats visible behind a second tree. The garments on both figures drape in a naturalistic way, and their heads are shown in three-quarter view. The cows and goats half-hidden behind the trees are an attempt at suggesting spatial depth, though the effect is acknowledged as unsuccessful. Crucially, this miniature is unframed, a direct inheritance from the papyrus roll tradition.

  The second artist took a markedly different approach. All of the remaining miniatures are enclosed in frames of red and gold. The second artist shows little command of the human body's proportions and struggles with anything beyond a static pose. On folio 100 verso, a reclining figure is rendered in a way the manuscript's scholarly tradition has called utterly unconvincing. Faces in these miniatures appear either straight-on or in full profile; the three-quarter view that the first artist still attempted is gone entirely. Clothing no longer falls in folds but is reduced to rhythmic curving lines.

• 4. A New Visual Language

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  On folios 44 verso and 45 recto, the second artist's landscapes share a striking quality with Roman floor mosaics: items are spread evenly across the page, nothing overlaps, and there is no ground line to anchor figures to the earth. Scholars have suggested that those mosaics may have served as a direct source of inspiration. When compartments divide the page, as on folio 108 recto, the effect reinforces this flatness. There is no attempt to model three-dimensional space.

  The three author portraits, found on folios 3 verso, 9 recto, and 14 recto, follow a different set of conventions drawn from the papyrus scroll tradition. In each one, Virgil sits on a chair positioned between a lectern and a locked chest. The portrait on folio 3 verso places the lectern to Virgil's right and the chest to his left. The two remaining portraits reverse that arrangement. These portraits were inserted directly into the text column rather than occupying a full page, a format inherited from earlier scroll manuscripts.

• 5. Origins and Ownership

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  Where the Vergilius Romanus was made remains unresolved. The manuscript was produced in an undetermined province of the late Roman world. The art historian Martin Henig examined aspects of the illumination and proposed that it was made in Britain. If Henig's attribution is correct, the manuscript would hold the distinction of being the oldest surviving British codex. The manuscript was at the Abbey of St Denis until the 15th century, but how it arrived there is not known, and neither is the path by which it eventually reached the Vatican. The Biblioteca Apostolica now holds it alongside two other ancient Virgilian manuscripts: the Vergilius Vaticanus, catalogued as Cod. Vat. lat. 3225, and the Vergilius Augusteus. Both are entirely separate works, and scholars take care to keep the three distinct. Henig's British-origin hypothesis, if confirmed, would tie the earliest illustrated Virgil to an island province at the far edge of the Roman world.