Evangelist Portrait - Gallery

Gallery

• Virgil from the Roman Virgil, A C5th secular author portrait in the classical tradition. Note the scroll-box, although the book it is in is a codex.

• One of three author portraits in the Vienna Dioscurides of the 1st century physician author. He is painting a plant held by its personification. Early C6th Byzantine.

• Group author portrait of distinguished physicians from the Vienna Dioscurides. Presumably collated from individual portraits in their works. Only Galen has a chair.

• The earliest surviving evangelist portrait, in the Rossano Gospels, Mark writing on a scroll, C6th. Written under Byzantine rule in Italy (the mark above his shoulders is a stain).

• Luke in the St. Augustine Gospels, C6th Italian. Following more formal classical models, like the imperial consular portraits in the Chronography of 354.

• Imago Leonis - the Lion of Mark from the Echternach Gospels which show no portraits, only the symbols. Insular c. 690.

• John, Book of Mulling, late C8th Insular pocket Gospels, with the portraits as the only whole page illumination.

• Matthew; Anglo-Saxon 8th century, combining many classical details, such as the curtains, with interlace decoration on the chair. Stockholm Codex Aureus

• Ebbo Gospels, C9th, Matthew

• Luke, Fulda School, c. 840

• Four evangelists and prophets surround Christ. C. 850 by Haregarius of Tours.

• A much rarer author portrait of St Paul C9th, follows similar conventions.

• Luke, Byzantine, 10th century, British Library. The side-table with writing materials is much more typical of the Orthodox world.

• Origen; The dolphin-shaped lectern stem, still understood in Byzantine examples, has metamorphosed into a kind of dragon in northern Europe

• Spassky Gospels, Yaroslavl, 1220s. Compare the arch and curtains with the Chrongraphy of 354; their function now seems lost in this double portrait, whose artist is also unclear how a scroll functions.

• The Angel of Matthew, Andrei Rublev's only known miniature, from the Khitrovo Gospels, ca. 1400, containing full-page evangelist portraits and the first Russian full-page symbols.