The Cotton Genesis

Reflection

The Cotton Genesis — British Library Cotton MS Otho B VI — is the great lost illuminated Septuagint of Western Christianity. Originally a complete Greek Genesis on vellum produced in Egypt in the late fifth or early sixth century, the manuscript carried 339 miniatures arranged through the patriarchal narratives, the most ambitious cycle of biblical illustration to survive from late antiquity. The codex passed into the Cotton Library of Sir Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century and was housed at Ashburnham House when fire swept the building in October 1731. About 150 charred fragments were rescued from the ashes; the rest of the manuscript was lost. What survives is blackened beyond legibility for most pages, but scholars know what the lost miniatures looked like because their compositions were copied wholesale onto the mosaics of the atrium vault of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice in the thirteenth century. Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler showed in their foundational 1986 study that the Venetian mosaicists worked directly from the Cotton Genesis during a period when the manuscript was at Venice, preserving the lost iconography in stone and gold. The Cotton fragments and the San Marco mosaics together permit a near-complete reconstruction of the manuscript's program — a remarkable case of a destroyed book preserved through its architectural afterlife.

Sources: Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert L. Kessler, The Cotton Genesis (Princeton, 1986); Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (Chicago, 1984); John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Phaidon, 1997).