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Biblia Visigótico-Mozárabe de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro de León MS 2, 960

Visigothic-Mozarabic Bible of the Royal Collegiate Church of Saint Isidore of Leon
Other names: Codex Biblicus Legionensis, Codex Gothicus Legionensis.

Goliath Challenges the Israelites

Victory of the Israelites over the Philistines at Carmel

Battle of Mount Gilboa

Return of David to Jerusalem.

King David and his army

Death of Absalon

Solomon

Death of Jezebel

El Archivo Capitular de la Colegiata de San Isidoro cuenta entre sus tesoros con una Biblia visigótico-mozárabe realizada por Florencio y Sancho en el año 960. Cuenta con 517 folios y ricas ilustraciones.
The Chapter Archive of San Isidoro Collegiate counts among its treasures a Visigothic-Mozarabic Bible by Florentius and Sanctius in 960. It has 517 pages and rich illustrations.

The Visigothic-Mozarabic Bible of St. Isidore is considered not only one of the rarest and most valuable of medieval manuscripts but the best documented Mozarabic bible extant. Precisely dated—having been completed on June 19, 960 in the Monastery of Valeránica—and exactly recorded with the names and portraits of its copyists, the miniaturist Florencio and the calligrapher Sancho, this bible contains all the books of the Old and New Testaments, as well as prologues, biblical commentaries and other texts. It is written in lowercase visigothic-mozarabic lettering with initial capital letters in the interlaced Saxon style and decorated with biblical scenes and roundels.

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108
BIBLE
Monastery of Valeranica (Castile), 960
Tempera on parchment
19 x 13⅝ in. (48.5 x 34.5 cm)
Real Colegiata de San Isidoro, León (Cod. 2)

This large, complete Bible is written in two columns in Visigothic minuscule, the Hispanic form of script that was employed on the peninsula between the seventh and the twelfth century. It opens with a page devoted to Christ with the four evangelist symbols and ten pages of tables tracing in a series of linked medallions the ancestors of Christ, beginning with Adam and Eve; this is a series unique to the Spanish tradition and present in the Beatus Commentaries as a feature borrowed from Bible illustration. The illumination of the New Testament consists of seventeen canon tables and small figures of Saint Paul beside the beginning of his Epistles. In contrast, the Old Testament is extraordinarily rich in illustrations. Although Genesis has only two pictures—the popular subjects Adam and Eve and the Offering of Isaac—the Old Testament books that follow display more than eighty subjects in narrative illustrations inserted in the columns of text immediately after the passages that supply their themes. This system of illustration is one associated with the earliest stages of Christian illumination; it soon gave way to a preference for framed miniatures less tightly linked to the texts that they illustrated. The column-picture format and parallels between the pictorial organization and compositional formulas associated with early Bible illustration outside of Spain are signs that this Bible represents an ancient tradition of illumination. Another such sign is the presence of numerous glosses in the margins of the Old Testament giving the Old Latin versions of the Vulgate text, which became standard about 400. It is probable, then, that the Leon Bible of 960 was copied from a Spanish Bible from the Visigothic period or earlier, which itself must have been based upon illustrated books from important Christian centers outside the peninsula. This manuscript is, therefore, a valuable witness to the early stages of the history of Christian illumination.
    From the colophons and a magnificent picture of Sanctius beneath a grand Omega saluting with a raised cup his master, Florentius (fol. 514), it is clear that this manuscript was copied by Sanctius at the Castilian scriptorium of Valeranica, south of Burgos. Florentius had been responsible for the Moralia in Iob of 945 (cat. 84) and also for a Bible of 943, now lost, that probably served as the model for the Bible of 960 and for the Bible completed in 1162 for San Isidoro in Leon (cat. 150). Beyond producing its model, it is not clear what role, if any, Florentius had in the Bible of 960. Figures in this Bible resemble those in other Spanish manuscripts of the tenth century in that they do not display any sense of plasticity and are enveloped in complex drapery folds patterned in a mosaic of different colors.
JWW
Source: pp.235-236 The Art of Medieval Spain AD 500-1200, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1993

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Among the earliest illustrated great bibles of this period is that preserved in the Colegiata of San Isidoro in León in north-western Spain. From the colophon at the end we learn that it was completed by the presbyter Sanctius with the help of Florentius, a monk. The manuscript is written in two columns to a page and the illustrations are introduced into the columns of writing and are thus in close connection with the corresponding passages of the text. Such an arrangement is certainty not new and may be found in copies of early texts such as the fragment of the Ravennate Annals in Merseburg. The distribution of the illustrations in the Bible of San Isidoro is very uneven. Whereas Genesis has only two pictures, Exodus is richly illustrated, as are also the books of Kings. Leviticus and Numbers have nothing, and the same is true for the four Gospels and the Apocalypse. This suggests that the ultimate sources of these illustrations were individual books of the Bible in single volumes and not a bible with a long series of miniatures of its own.
Source: The Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 2 edited by G. W. H. Lampe