Galich Gospel of 1357: 4 Remarkable Evangelist Portraits

The four Evangelists, fol. 27v of the Galich Gospel of 1357, GIM Syn. 68, with John and Mark above Luke and Matthew.

The four Evangelists reproduced on this parchment folio belong to the Galich Gospel of 1357, preserved in the State Historical Museum in Moscow as GIM, Synodal Collection no. 68, fol. 27v. The catalogue information supplied with the photograph refers to another manuscript: Uvarov 181, a Jerusalem Typikon copied at Galich in 1436. That codex is independently recorded as a manuscript from the Novozazersky Dormition Monastery and is unrelated to the miniature shown here. The Galich Gospel, by contrast, is a fourteenth-century parchment Gospel lectionary and this page contains its sole surviving figural miniature.

Across a single leaf, four separate author portraits occupy compact architectural enclosures. Saint John appears at the upper left and Mark opposite him; Luke sits below John, with Matthew in the lower right compartment. Red identifying inscriptions accompany the figures. Their enlarged heads, sharply drawn features, yellow haloes and strongly outlined garments give the miniature an immediacy quite different from the more spatially elaborate Evangelist portraits associated with metropolitan Byzantine book painting.

The Four Evangelists in the Galich Gospel of 1357

Divided into four pictorial fields by slender architectural forms and horizontal bands, the page presents an unusual arrangement. Medieval Gospel manuscripts more commonly introduce the Evangelists separately, each portrait associated with the beginning of his text. Here they have been brought together into something approaching a composite frontispiece, yet each retains his own seat, writing equipment and architectural environment. L. P. Zhukovskaya noted that such a gathering of all four Evangelists on one folio is comparatively rare in early manuscripts, especially in this particular form.

John is the most immediately recognisable figure. Elderly and white-bearded, he bends towards the small book held in his hands. Its red lettering begins with the Church Slavonic words iskoni bě slovo, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The inscription and text therefore reinforce one another in establishing his identity. His red outer garment is crossed by a dark blue-green mantle, while the tall structure at the far left compresses the surrounding space into a narrow vertical strip.

At the upper right sits Mark, younger in appearance, with dark curling hair and beard. His right hand reaches towards the writing surface and its small dark inkwell, while the other supports a light-coloured writing object across his lap. Below John, Luke is represented as an elderly white-bearded man in a blue-green garment; a red-and-light-coloured codex or writing tablet rests near his knee. Matthew, in the lower right, wears a conspicuous red garment beneath a darker mantle; one hand is raised towards his chest while the other extends towards the centre of the page.

A Single Folio Built from Four Author Portraits

The arrangement does more than economise space. Recent discussion of Evangelist imagery in Old Russian manuscripts has identified the Galich Gospel as one of the relatively uncommon cases in which all four authors appear together on one leaf and are oriented in pairs towards one another. E. S. Smirnova places this configuration within a wider history of “reversed” Evangelist portraits in the manuscript art of Rus, where figures could turn either right or left according to compositional needs. She also points out an important feature of the Galich miniature: John is surrounded by architecture rather than placed in the mountainous landscape found in another established strand of his iconography. The arrangement recalls older manuscript models, including the Ostromir and Mstislav Gospels.

Compressed within the four compartments, this older model has changed considerably. Buildings have become narrow towers, canopies and pieces of writing furniture; depth is minimal. Architecture separates the Evangelists and at the same time binds the page together, its verticals continuing from one compartment towards another. The small roofs above the structures introduce repeated angular accents, while red bands across the centre and lower edge establish a firmer horizontal order.

There is an interesting tension between individuality and repetition. Each author has a distinct physiognomy, posture and arrangement of garments, yet the four portraits obey the same basic visual premise: a seated Evangelist, a halo, writing equipment, architectural framing. The eye moves around the page through these correspondences rather than through narrative action.

Colour, Contour and the Character of the Miniature

The palette is strikingly restricted. Zhukovskaya records four principal colours in the miniature, yellow, blue, green and red, with the contours reinforced in ink. Large areas of red are especially active: John’s outer garment, the seats, parts of Matthew’s clothing, architectural roofs and numerous smaller accents. Blue and green tend to carry the heavier drapery and architectural passages, while yellow defines the haloes and several structural elements.

Across the faces, brows, eyes, noses, hair and beards are described by dark strokes against the parchment-toned flesh; modelling remains limited. Drapery folds behave similarly, sometimes forming broad curves, elsewhere breaking into rapid angular lines. The hands can seem disproportionately large and the heads still more so, an effect already observed in earlier scholarship on the manuscript. Instead of concealing those disproportions through tonal modelling, the painter allows the contour to dominate.

Older scholars described the execution in distinctly severe terms, stressing its lack of technical refinement. A closer visual reading makes another aspect equally evident: the drawing is unusually decisive. Forms are established quickly, without the repeated softening of outlines or gradual spatial transitions found in more sophisticated luxury manuscripts. The result belongs to a different level of artistic production, one that has consequently been valued as evidence for provincial book painting in fourteenth-century north-eastern Rus. The Orthodox Encyclopedia likewise treats the miniature as an important survival of provincial painting from the middle of the century.

Feofan and the Making of the Galich Gospel

The Galich Gospel consists of 178 parchment folios measuring approximately 28.2–28.5 × 22–22.2 cm. It is a complete aprakos Gospel, which means that the Gospel readings are arranged for liturgical use rather than presented simply as four continuous biblical texts. Four scribes took part in its production, writing in ustav in two columns. On folio 178v, the colophon dates the manuscript to 6865 from Creation, corresponding to 1357, and states that it was written at Galich during the reign of Grand Prince Ivan Ivanovich. The named scribe gives his name as Fofan, or Feofan.

Palaeographical analysis by L. P. Zhukovskaya considerably refined that picture. She distinguished the work of four separate scribes and associated Feofan with roughly half of the manuscript, including its beginning and conclusion. Her examination of the handwriting, initials and coloured inscriptions led her to propose that he probably also executed the miniature. She further considered him the person who directed the copying project, assigning portions of the manuscript to other scribes while continuing to work on it himself. The full study is available through the Russian Academy study.

This possibility matters because the miniature would then belong directly to the work of a scribe rather than to a separately employed specialist illuminator. Visible on the page itself is the close relationship between writing and image. Red inscriptions, written books and ornamental colour remain integral to the figures, while the linear habits of the manuscript page are carried into faces, architecture and drapery.

For comparison with another East Slavic parchment codex preserved in the same museum, Pictavium’s discussion of Synodal Manuscript 108 shows a very different relationship between disciplined ustav, rubrication and coloured ornament. A later example of northern Rus manuscript production, the Horologion of 1423, provides another useful point of comparison for the continuing role of red pigment, architectural drawing and monastic book production.

The Manuscript after 1357

The subsequent history of the Galich Gospel cannot be reconstructed continuously. On folio 27v, a later inscription records a donation made in 1563 and may indicate that the book was still connected with the Galich area at that date, although the place-names mentioned in the note have resisted secure identification. The manuscript is now in the State Historical Museum as Synodal Collection no. 68.

Its four Evangelists remain unusually revealing precisely because the miniature is so concentrated. The page preserves established Christian author types and architectural conventions, yet translates them into a local pictorial language of broad colour fields, emphatic outlines and compact figures. On one parchment leaf, the four writers have been given four small working spaces, each independent and each pressed against the others by the strict geometry of the page.

(The translation was edited by N. Jones.)