Vatican Palimpsests Digital Recovery of Erased Identities [by A. Németh]

Vat.gr.19 <inf.2>

Vat. gr. 19 contains the Schedographia of the Byzantine Grammarian, Manuel Moschopoulos. In this work, the Byzantine author presents examples drawn from Biblical and Homeric topics to serve as educational exercises by grammatical analysis. George Baiophoros, the scribe who completed the current manuscript in 1425 (f. 118v) and wrote or annotated several other Vatican manuscripts (Vat. gr. 21, Vat. gr. 157 and Urb. gr. 154), used many recycled folios from four earlier codices. The manuscript preserves its original Byzantine binding produced at the Prodromos Monastery. The manuscript probably arrived to the Vatican Library from the possession of Cristoforo Garatone (1398-1448) in the fifteenth century.

An erased but not rewritten bifolio of Vat. gr. 19 (ff. II + III) preserves fragments from one of the homilies on Genesis by John Chrysostom. The original codex was copied in Perlschrift in the eleventh century, and each large page has two columns. The recycled folio was folded in half when inserted in the front Vat. gr. 19 as protective flyleaves. Angelo Mai used this fragment as a test material for the alternative options of chemical reagents to be applied for deciphering palimpsests. The annotations written in his own hand testify to the various options he tried, ‘Gioberti tincture’ (Prussiato di potassa), sulphur tincture (Idrosulfuro di potassa) and gallnut (Galla). He attests to his experiment in Vat. lat. 10163, f. 107r: “I experimented with three kinds of chemical acids in the initial part of this <manuscript>”. Finally, he chose the Gallic ink as a means of deciphering texts.

Vat. gr. 19, ff. IIv + IIIr

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Vat. gr. 19, f. IIv and Vat. gr. 1613, p. 3. Perlschrift

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