CODICE

CODICE. – An ancient term indicating a collection of writing material—papyrus, parchment, wax tablet—bound into fascicles. Seneca (De brevitate vitae, XVIII, 4) defined it as a “contextus plurium tabularum.” In general, the codex may be described as a method of arranging and preserving writing, distinct from the scroll, which is characteristic of the use of long strips of papyrus; the codex, already proper to bronze diplomas, diptychs, and tablets, became widespread with the use of parchment. There are still about ten codices in papyrus from the 6th–10th centuries, while the oldest surviving codices in parchment date from the 3rd–4th centuries. Today, the term codex is generally applied to manuscript books made of parchment or paper.

In the description of codices, certain technical expressions are used, which are also preserved in the description of the earliest printed books, since for a long time these tended to imitate the external forms of the parchment codex.

The format, i.e., the size, of the codex is called in-folio, in-quarto, in-octavo, etc., according to whether the sheet is folded, actually or ideally, once, twice, three times, or more (today it is preferred to indicate dimensions in millimetres); the fascicles that make up the codex are called gatherings (sometimes also quires), consisting of sheets sewn together, regardless of their number; the parts that make up the gathering are called leaves; half a leaf is called a folio and has two sides, indicated as a and b or better recto and verso; a page is half a folio (one side), which may be written in one or more columns. Signatures are the indications given with numbers or letters, for the binder, at the beginning or end of the gathering, so that the gatherings can be bound in the desired order; catchword is the first word of a page or gathering written below the last line of the preceding page or gathering. Moreover: codices are called miscellaneous when they contain works by different authors or of different character; autograph if they are in the author’s own hand; anonymous (or unattributed) when they do not bear the author’s name; untitled if they lack a title; defective if they have lost their initial leaves; incomplete when leaves are missing elsewhere. In relation to the manuscript tradition of a given text, archetype refers to the (lost) codex from which copies of the same family derive; apograph, on the other hand, refers to the copy itself.

ARTE. – From the earliest times of the Christian faith, the beauty of the characters and the decorum with which they were arranged in the pages of ancient codices containing sacred texts were enhanced by the value of illumination (v.).
Bibles (v.), Gospels (v.), Psalters (v.) were adorned with figurations intended to make the narrative of the events of the New and Old Testaments more intelligible.

In this field, the development and formal evolution of codices corresponds to that of illumination itself. It may be said that in the earliest surviving examples (Quedlinburg Bible, Berlin, Royal Library, 4th cent.; Gospel Book, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library, cod. 286, late 6th cent.), the illuminations that adorn them reveal the same characteristics that were proper to painting in Italy at that time.

From the 6th century onward until the 9th, while in Italy painting and thus illumination slowly and painfully evolved, the finest codices were produced within the orbit of Byzantine art, until the iconoclastic controversy also brought a halt to progress in this field. In these Byzantine codices, however, a conception of page composition is evident that is not dissimilar

from that of the ancients; namely, the illustration, the miniature, is intended as a complement that may or may not be inserted into the page’s architecture without necessarily forming an indissoluble unity with the characters of the text. In this sense, both the Italian and Byzantine codices contrast with the manner in which the graphic and illustrative elements of the page are organically distributed in codices produced in the British Isles. In these, there is a new and unified sense of decoration, not only in the calligraphic forms but also in the arrangement of the text on the pages, and especially in the large initials. These are illuminated, and the letters are formed with strange vermiform interlacings, foliage, monsters, anthropomorphic beings, etc., which, painted in gouache with vivid colors, twist and intertwine with unpredictable logic within the sharply defined spaces. This taste quickly spread, and its reflections reached even the Byzantine workshops and the Italian monasteries, where calligraphers and miniaturists divided the labor in works of greater commitment, whereas in the oldest British codices, the work seems instead to have been executed by a single person.

The pre-Carolingian and Carolingian codices, as well as others deriving from them (v. arte), perpetuate this taste for a unified sense of page decoration, which tends toward ever-greater clarity. From the Carolingian workshops emerged some codices that rank among the masterpieces of the most refined medieval taste.

In many of the codices produced in the monastery of Bobbio, a center of intense cultural exchange with the regions of northern Europe, and in many of those from the Benedictine monasteries of southern Italy, particularly Montecassino, the way in which the spaces on the pages are distributed, the importance given to the gigantic and complex initials, and the very style of the miniatures that illustrate the texts clearly reveal the influence of that northern taste, which at the same time was widely diffused across the territories of Germany.

Meanwhile, after the conflicts associated with the Iconoclastic Controversy had been overcome, the art of illumination flourished again in the East between the 10th and 12th centuries, and beautiful codices were produced with loving and intelligent care in imperial libraries or transferred, as objects of high value, to the West.

The intense activity that characterized the Romanesque age was also reflected in the production of codices; their output multiplied in the scriptoria of the monasteries, where, to meet the ever-increasing demand, lay calligraphers and miniaturists were also employed. Moreover, alongside sacred texts, secular works began to be transcribed in codices, such as chivalric romances, legal or medical studies, treatises on every subject, even on the art of hunting, like the *De arte venandi cum avibus* composed for Frederick II, of which a copy executed for King Manfred (1258–66) survives in the Vatican Library (cod. Pal. lat. 1271).

Furthermore, as in every other field of art, the Romanesque age is also characterized in the realm of codices by the accentuation and advancement of the characteristics of the preceding age, by a constant and progressive enrichment of expressive possibilities that, in our case, results in an ever-greater unity and concreteness in the composition of the page. Here, large initials still echo elements of Carolingian and pre-Carolingian culture (Bible of the Communal Library of Perugia, cod. 439), or superimposed scenes in airy spaces recall ancient decorative themes perpetuated in the use of *exultet* rolls (Life of St. Benedict, cod. Vat. lat. 1202), or complex figurations show direct relationships with Anglo-Saxon illumination (Chronicon Volturnense, Vatican Library, cod. Barb. lat. 2754).

Thus, the advent of the Gothic period is prepared, whose spirit, when properly understood, first manifested itself in the field of art precisely in the composition of certain illuminated pages of Irish codices, where the need and taste for confining and limiting the flights of vivid imagination within the tight and unpredictable logic of a tangle of lines are already resolved in artistic forms. The Gothic style, however, created its masterpieces in the realm of codices precisely in the organic distribution of the material, whether writing or illumination, on the page.

This already renders admirable many works still to be assigned to the Romanesque age (e.g., British Museum Library, Add. Ms. 18,720) and thus results in works of absolute beauty in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, especially in centers where Gothic culture and taste flourished most intensely and purely, such as in Italy at Siena, Bologna, and Lombardy, and beyond the Alps in France, where codices such as *Les très riches heures du duc de Berry* (Chantilly, Musée Condé) have no equal in the harmony of their composition and the balance of the relationships between the space assigned to writing and that assigned to decoration.

The Renaissance brought to Italy a sense of new architecture in the classical style, even in the distribution of the parts on the pages of codices, so that sometimes the pages rich in miniatures of works such as the Bible of Borso d’Este (Modena) and that of the Duke of Urbino (Vatican) seem to have been studied in the distribution of balanced spaces between bases, pillars, cornices, and architraves by an architect rather than by a calligrapher or miniaturist.

When these forms spread to other regions of Europe, the art of printing had already rendered the labor of calligraphers futile, while the art of illumination had become a refined and sophisticated craftsmanship. From the earliest times, the leaves of codices were held together by bindings (v.). These were made of parchment, leather, painted wood, or covered with fabric, parchment, or paper, but also of metal plates embossed and adorned with stones and enamels, often rising to the dignity of true works of art.

- See Plates CXXIII–CXXIV.
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