Made around the turn of the first millennium the Apollonius pictus manuscript of the Hungarian National Library preserves the oldest known illustration cycle of a Late Antique adventure story, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri. Until very recently the only art historian who recognized the importance of the manuscript was Kurt Weitzmann, who believed that the style of the thirty-eight red line-drawings of the manuscript revealed classical ancestors, which, within the theoretical framework Weitzmann constructed, meant that the images were derived from a lost Late Antique original. Leaving aside the problems of a speculative archetype my paper is an attempt to unfold the textual and visual associations, both Late Antique and Ottonian, the manuscript evoked in the circle of its medieval readers. To this end I investigate the possible visual messages of the "papyrus-style" layout-structure of the manuscript, and that of the characteristic motifs of the single images.
Apollonius pictus; Ottonian book-culture; narrative illustration; layout; Werden an der Ruhr; Fulda; National Széchényi Library Budapest
This paper is a result of my research on the "Illustrated Apollonius: Transformations of a Medieval Bestseller" I started as a 2013–2014 member at the Historical School of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, with the support of the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and currently conduct with the support of the Bolyai János Research Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.