CODEX. -
An ancient term denoting a body of writing material — papyrus, parchment, waxed tablet — gathered into quires. Seneca (De brevit. vitae, XVIII, 4) defined it as a "contextus plurium tabularum." In general it may be said that the codex is a way of arranging and preserving a written text, different from the roll, which is characteristic of the use of long strips of papyrus; the codex, on the other hand, already proper to bronze diplomas, diptychs and tablets, became widespread with the use of parchment; there still survive, however, about ten papyrus codices from the 6th-10th centuries, while the oldest parchment codices that have come down to us are from the 3rd-4th century. The term codex is today generally applied to parchment or paper manuscripts having the form of a book.
In the description of codices certain technical expressions are used, which are also retained in the description of the oldest printed books, since these, for a long time, tended to imitate in their external forms the parchment codex.
The format, that is the size, of the codex is called in-folio, in-quarto, in-octavo, etc., according as the sheet is folded, really or ideally, once, twice, three times or more (today it is preferred to indicate the dimensions in millimeters); the quires that make up the codex are called quaternions (sometimes also quinternions), consisting of sheets sewn together, whatever their number; the parts that make up the quire are called sheets; half of the sheet is called a leaf and has two sides, which are indicated as a and b, or better recto and verso; a page is half of the leaf (one side), which may be written in one or more columns. Signatures are the indications given by numbers or letters, for the binder, at the beginning or end of the quire, so that the quires may be bound in the desired order; a catchword is the first word of a page or of a quire written below the last line of the preceding page or quire. Furthermore: codices are called miscellaneous when they contain works by different authors or of a different character; autographs if they are in the author's own hand; adespota (or anonymous) when they do not bear the author's name; anepigraphic if they lack a title; arefal if they have lost their initial leaves; mutilated when there are leaves missing elsewhere. In relation to the manuscript tradition of a given text, the (lost) codex from which the copies of one and the same family descend is called the archetype; an apograph, on the other hand, is the copy itself.
Bibliography3 works
Carmelo Trasselli
ART
To the beauty of the characters and the decorum with which they are arranged on the leaves of ancient codices containing the sacred texts, in those orderly little fields of words, there was added, from the earliest times of the Christian faith, the merit of illumination (v.).
Bibles (v.), Evangeliaries (v.), Psalters (v.) were embellished with figurations intended to make the narrative of the events of the New and Old Testament more intelligible.
In this field the development and formal evolution of codices corresponds to that of illumination itself. And it may be said that, in the oldest exemplars (Quedlinburg Bible, Berlin, Royal Library, 4th cent.; Evangeliary, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library, cod. 286, end of the 6th cent.), the miniatures that adorn them reveal the same characteristics that were proper to painting in Italy in that age.
From the 6th century onward until the 9th, while in Italy the art of painting, and therefore illumination as well, evolved slowly and laboriously, the most beautiful codices were produced within the orbit of Byzantine art, until the iconoclastic controversy marked a halt in this field too. In these Byzantine codices, however, there is evident a conception of the composition of the page not unlike
than that which the ancients had; that is, illustration, miniature painting, is understood as a complement that may or may not be inserted into the architecture of the page without necessarily forming an inseparable unity with the characters of the text. In this sense, the manner of understanding the organic distribution of the graphic and illustrative elements of the page as it appears in codices composed in the British Isles contrasts both with our own codices and with Byzantine ones. In them there is present a new and unified sense of decoration not only in the calligraphic forms but in the arrangement of the text on the pages, and above all in the great initials. These are illuminated and the letters are formed with strange vermiform interlacements, foliage, monsters, anthropomorphic beings, etc., which, colored in gouache, in vivid hues, unwind and wrap and interweave with unpredictable logic within sharply delimited spaces. It is a taste that spreads at once and whose reflections reach as far as the Byzantine workshops and those of the Italian monasteries, where calligraphers and miniaturists divided among themselves, in works of greater commitment, the labor which, at least in the oldest British codices, seems instead to have been executed by one and the same person. The pre-Carolingian and Carolingian codices too, and the others that have characters derived from them (v. CAROLINGIA, ARTE), perpetuate that taste for a unified sense of the decoration of the page which tends toward ever greater clarity. From the Carolingian workshops there then issued certain codices that must be counted among the masterpieces of the most refined medieval taste.
In many of the codices composed in the monastery of Bobbio, a center of intense cultural exchanges with the regions of northern Europe, and in many of those composed in the Benedictine monasteries of southern Italy, of Montecassino in particular, in the manner in which the spaces are distributed on the pages, in the importance assigned to the gigantic complex initials and in the very style of the miniatures that illustrate the texts, there appear clearly the portals of that Nordic taste which was at that time, on the other hand, very widely diffused also in the territories of Germany.
Meanwhile, once the contrasts connected with the struggle of the iconoclasts had been overcome, in the East between the 10th and 12th centuries the art of miniature painting flourished anew, and most beautiful codices were composed, gathered with loving intelligent care in the imperial libraries or transferred, as objects of high value, to the West.
The intense activity that characterizes the Romanesque age everywhere was reflected also in the production of codices; it multiplied production in those scriptoria of the monasteries where, in order to meet the ever greater demands, lay calligraphers and miniaturists were also called to work. On the other hand, beyond the sacred texts, profane texts were now transcribed in codices, such as chivalric romances or studies of law or medicine, treatises on every subject, even the art of hunting, such as the De arte venandi cum avibus composed for Frederick II, of which there survives a copy executed for King Manfred (1258-66) in the Vatican Library (cod. Pal. lat. 1271).
Moreover, as in every other field of art, the Romanesque age is characterized also in that of codices by the accentuation and the progress of the characteristics proper to the preceding age, by their progressive constant enrichment with expressive possibilities which, in our case, resolves itself in an ever greater unity and concreteness in the composition of the page. Here great initials still echo elements of Carolingian and pre-Carolingian culture (Bible of the Biblioteca Comunale of Perugia, cod. 459), or scenes superimposed in airy spaces recall most ancient decorative themes perpetuated in the use of the exultet (Vita s. Benedicti, cod. Vat. lat. 1202), or complex figurations show direct relations with Anglo-Saxon miniature painting (Chronicon Vulturnense, Vatican Library, cod. Barb. lat. 2754).
Thus the advent of the Gothic period is prepared, whose spirit, rightly understood, gave its first distant manifestations in the field of art precisely in the composition of certain illuminated pages of Irish codices, where there is already resolved, in forms of art, the necessity and the taste of closing and limiting the flights of a heated fantasy within the tight and unpredictable logic of a tangle of lines, within the great initials which, occupying half and three quarters of the page, divide the spaces into a thousand meanders. Nevertheless, the Gothic taste created its masterpieces in the field of codices precisely in the organic distribution of the material, whether it be writing or miniature, on the page.
It already makes admirable many works still to be assigned to the Romanesque age (e.g., library of the British Museum, Add. Ms. 18,720) and thus resolves itself into works of absolute beauty in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, especially in the centers where culture and Gothic taste had their most intense and genuine flowering, here in Italy at Siena, at Bologna, in Lombardy, beyond the Alps in France where codices such as Les tres riches heures of the Duke of Berry (Chantilly, Musée Condé) for the harmony of the composition and the balance of the relationships between the space assigned to writing and the space assigned to decoration find no comparisons.
The Renaissance brought to Italy the sense of the new architecture of classicizing taste also in the distribution of the parts in the pages of codices, so that, at times, the pages rich in miniatures of works such as the Bible of Borso d'Este (Modena) and that of the Duke of Urbino (Vaticana) might be said to have been studied in the distribution of the spaces balanced between bases, pillars, frames and architectural elements by an architect rather than by a calligrapher or a miniaturist.
When those forms spread to the other regions of Europe, the art of printing had already rendered vain the labor of the calligraphers, while the art of miniature was by then an abased and refined craft practice. From the most ancient times the leaves of codices were held together by bindings (v.). These were executed in parchment, in leather, in painted wood or wood covered with cloth, parchment or paper, but also in embossed metal plates adorned with stones and enamels, often rising to the dignity of true works of art. - See Tavy. CXXIII-CXXIV.
Bibliography4 works
Emilio Lavagnino