Chronicle of George Hamartolos: Michael of Tver and Xenia before Christ

Along the front face of Christ's footstool, in letters easily missed, a painter calls himself “the much-sinful servant of God Prokopii.” His signature belongs to the frontispiece on folio 17v of the Tver copy of the Chronicle of George Hamartolos, an illuminated parchment codex now in the Russian State Library in Moscow (f. 173/I, no. 100). The miniature shows Christ enthroned beneath a triple arcade. Two supplicants stand on either side of him, their inscriptions naming them as Michael and Oksiniia: Prince Michael Yaroslavich of Tver and his mother, Princess Xenia. On the facing page, folio 18, the chronicler himself, the monk George, appears as author. The two pages open a manuscript usually assigned to Tver, which scholars have dated anywhere from the last years of the thirteenth century to the first half of the fourteenth.

Christ Enthroned beneath the Triple Arcade

Christ occupies the central bay, the widest of the three. He sits frontally on a broad throne with a green cushion extending behind him, his bare feet resting on a red footstool scattered with small yellow ornaments. His right hand is raised in blessing before the chest. With the left he holds a Gospel book, opened outward to the viewer. The dark green himation falls from his left shoulder, crosses his lap, and curls in a long, restless end beneath the lower edge of the book. Beneath it the chiton is rose-red, its folds marked by paler strokes. On the himation the highlights are thin white lines that run along the drapery and break at the knees. A cross-inscribed halo in ochre and red surrounds the head. The face, framed by long dark hair and a full beard, is modelled in warm flesh tones and held together by firm dark contours.

Folio 17v of the Tver copy of the Chronicle of George Hamartolos, parchment, late 13th to first half of the 14th century (date debated). Russian State Library, f. 173/I, no. 100. The painter Prokopii signed the front of Christ's footstool.

The arcade rests on slender columns with capitals. Its archivolts are painted dark green and patterned with white, and the side bays are noticeably narrower than the centre. Above the arches runs a crenellated parapet, with small red semicircular forms hanging from it. Higher still, three crowning elements rise against the ochre ground: a dark cupola on a drum at the centre, and two steep pyramidal roofs above small square structures at the sides. A red border encloses the whole page.

The surface has suffered. Paint losses interrupt much of the ground, a small lacuna has opened in the central bay to the upper left of the halo, and a dark fissure crosses the red footstool. Xenia's figure is the most damaged, her face darkened almost to illegibility. These losses matter because the miniature was also altered while it was being made. Published by G. Z. Bykova in 1991, restoration and technical study of the two frontispieces recovered traces of that earlier stage, discussed below.

Tver Cathedral or the Heavenly Jerusalem?

The building behind the figures is usually read as a three-aisled church with three domes of different shape. Several scholars, among them O. I. Podobedova and G. V. Popov, have taken it as a conventional image of the cathedral of the Saviour in Tver. That cathedral was founded in 1285 by Michael together with his mother and Bishop Simeon, and it was the first stone church built in north-eastern Rus' after the Mongol invasion. On this reading the setting recalls the founding patronage of the two figures standing before Christ.

The entry on Michael in the Orthodox Encyclopedia prefers another line of interpretation, which goes back to D. V. Ainalov and was later taken up by Frank Kämpfer. It treats the architecture as a symbolic image of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Heavenly Jerusalem. In that case the pale curtain lifted in the bay above Michael would stand for the opened doors of paradise, through which Christ promises salvation to the pious princes. Russian illuminators returned to symbolic architecture of this kind more than once. A century later, the Horologion of 1423 opens with a church-building miniature charged throughout with meaning.

Michael Yaroslavich and Xenia as Supplicants

Michael stands in the left bay, at Christ's right, turned three-quarters towards the throne. His left hand, the one nearer the centre, is raised with the palm open towards Christ, and his right is laid against his chest. He is bareheaded, with a high forehead, receding hair, a short beard and a moustache. He wears a green tunic with a broad border at the hem and a red cloak, the princely korzno, which falls from the shoulders. The broad pale collar with dark flecks has been identified as an ermine shoulder-piece, and the cloak may be fur-lined.

Not all of this belongs to the first design. Around the prince's head survive traces of a scraped halo, partly covered by the inscription with his name. A horizontal line across the forehead may be a narrow diadem, and X-ray photography shows something like the outline of a cap or crown. The female figure also once had a halo. These remains suggest the painter changed his plan during work, partly to bring out the prince's own features, above all the receding hairline that later Tver icons would keep as his recognisable sign. Bykova took the original halo as evidence that Michael was venerated very soon after his death at the Horde in 1318. The catalogue entry on the manuscript gives his dates as 1272–1319, while the encyclopedia places his birth in 1271/72 and his death on 22 November 1318.

Xenia stands in the right bay, facing the throne. A pale veil covers her head and shoulders over a dark red mantle, and what remains of her gesture of prayer is directed towards Christ. Popov read her headdress as a monastic hood and concluded that she was painted after her death, which the sources place in 1312 or 1313. The encyclopedia entry objects that her garments do not support this, and that the inscription gives her secular name. Xenia also had a political role: she ruled the principality during Michael's minority after the death of her husband, Yaroslav.

The two supplicants are much smaller than Christ. Michael wears no princely cap, and neither figure offers a book. These features link the miniature with portraiture after the Mongol conquest, in which the donor's gift gives way to prayer and humility. The encyclopedia compares the bareheaded Pskov prince Dovmont on the Mirozh icon of the Mother of God. Because no codex is presented, Michael may have received the manuscript rather than commissioned it. The costume has also drawn comment from specialists in dress. N. D. Protasov saw Old Bulgarian features in Michael's garments, and Krastyu Miyatev questioned that conclusion soon afterwards.

Inscriptions and the Painter Prokopii

The figures are named with the briefest formulas: the abbreviated IC XC for Christ, and simply Mikhail and Oksiniia for the two Tver figures, written in the upper part of their bays. The two inscriptions are not of the same date. The prince's name is either contemporary with the painting or was added during the reworking; the princess's name has been assigned to the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The open book in Christ's hands carries the words “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). At the base of the drum of the central dome there is a further inscription in minute ustav, recorded in the catalogue only as a short fragment.

Then there is Prokopii.

His signature on the footstool breaks off after the name, and the rest has been lost. In 1926 Iurii Olsufiev discussed him alongside Simon Ushakov in a study of naturalistic tendencies in icon painting. Two years later Olsufiev returned to the treatment of highlights in monuments from the former Trinity-Sergius collection. The thin white highlights on Christ's himation are exactly the kind of evidence such a study relies on.

Free Translation

ІС ХС: Jesus Christ.

МИХАИЛЬ: Michael.

ОКСИНИЯ: Oksiniia (Xenia).

мног[о] грешный рабъ б(ожи)и Прокопи[и]…: The much-sinful servant of God Prokopii… (the rest of the signature is lost).

The Gospel text: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Dating the Tver Chronicle of George Hamartolos

The manuscript has no date, and proposals have ranged widely. P. M. Stroev placed it at the beginning of the fifteenth century. N. N. Durnovo first assigned it to the twelfth century, a date the catalogue marks with an exclamation point, and later to the thirteenth. A preliminary union list of Russian manuscripts suggested the end of the thirteenth (with a question mark) to the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the fourteenth. On palaeographic grounds the codex is most often placed at the beginning, in the first third, or in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Most attempts to narrow the range start from the frontispiece:

• Ainalov: copied and illuminated no later than 1294, the year Michael married Anna, later venerated as Anna of Kashin. This would explain the presence of his mother beside him. However, the prince shown here, bearded and balding, hardly looks like a young man of just over twenty.
• Podobedova and Kämpfer: between 1304 and 1307.
• G. I. Vzdornov and Popov: a memorial book, made after Michael's death in 1318 and before the devastation of Tver in 1327.
• E. S. Smirnova: the end of the thirteenth century, on stylistic grounds.
• H. N. Lohvyn: assigned the writing and decoration of the first part of the manuscript to Kiev between 1285 and 1299. The catalogue notes that he gives no evidence for this.

Weighing these views, the Orthodox Encyclopedia entry settles on a broad span from the late thirteenth century to the first decades of the fourteenth. It does not exclude execution after Michael's death.

The pairing of a prince with his mother may also have a literary source. As summarised by the Pushkin House dictionary of Old Rus' bookmen, George's chronicle is a ninth-century work translated into Slavonic. It recounts world history from the Creation to 842, its narrative closing with the reign of Emperor Michael III and his mother Theodora. A Byzantine frontispiece showing that imperial pair may have stood behind the Tver composition. That would help explain the halos and their later removal. Popov's argument for a lost proto-original from Vladimir points to another possible intermediary.

Script, Illustration and Later Hands in the Tver Codex

The Tver Chronicle of George Hamartolos is written on parchment in folio, measuring 29.0 × 22.2 cm. It has 273 leaves in two columns of ustav, and both its beginning and its end are lost. Initials, headings and capital letters are in cinnabar. The binding of leather-covered boards dates from the sixteenth century.

Besides the two frontispieces, the text has 127 illustrations. Scholars have studied them for their links with Byzantine illustrated chronicles, a theme raised by Kurt Weitzmann in 1944 and developed by Podobedova in 1971. Christopher Walter's 1975 study of raising on a shield in Byzantine iconography includes the Tver images. The same ceremony appears in the Madrid Skylitzes. Historians of arms, notably A. N. Kirpichnikov, have used the miniatures as evidence for armour. On the textual side, P. A. Syrku argued that the Russian copy was made from a Bulgarian original.

Later readers left their own marks. Drawings and sketches of human figures from different periods appear on more than a dozen leaves, including two feasting scenes on folio 152v. Brief notes in small ustav are scattered through the margins. One mentions a prince named Vladimir Andreevich; another, on folio 238, a prince Vladimir. The most memorable is a fourteenth-century maxim at the foot of folio 174, given in the catalogue as аще ти ключить оум(е)р(е)ти, то оумри, а друга не выдаи: “If it befalls you to die, then die, but do not give up your friend.” Popov also reported a faint prayer and donation note on folio 265v.

From the Trinity-Sergius Lavra to the Russian State Library

The manuscript is not listed in the 1642 inventory of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery. When and how it entered the Lavra library is unknown, although S. I. Kochetov placed its arrival between 1642 and 1723. In 1747 it was transferred, with part of the Lavra collection, to the library of the Trinity Theological Seminary. After 1814 it passed to the Moscow Theological Academy, whose shelfmark, MDA 100, it long carried.

From 1920 the Academy's library belonged to the Sergiev branch of the library of the State Rumiantsev Museum. Between 1921 and 1931 the chronicle was shown at an exhibition of early manuscripts in the Sergiev Museum, housed in the former Lavra. It came from that exhibition to the State Lenin Library, now the Russian State Library, on 11 March 1931.