Vaticanus incomplete
However, we will consider this speculation, not to be given super-attention.
Suggestion of its origin and intended use.
- Speculation indeed, is entirely at fault as to the real age, native country, or former possessor of this manuscript. That it was not designed for common use, its size and the costliness of its execution and materials make evident; it was probably intended for service in the sanctuary of some basilica or the chapel of a monastery. One probable, although most important, item of information respecting the manuscript, we may perhaps furnish in the conjecture that it appears in an unfinished (p. 141) condition. The scribe did his duty, and left the text complete, but into the hands of the illuminator, its next stage of progress, the document never passed. Yet those short interspaces between the paragraphs may have been designed to admit the blazon of his pencil, and the minium, carmine, and azure of his brush, the rainbow tracing and colouring which were the poetry of the manufacture of books; the relief which nature itself craved from the dull uniformity of lampblack characters and horizontal lines. Nor does the appearance of initial letters of the ordinary size at the commencement of paragraphs at all oppose our suggestion, for all persons familiar with printed books of the fifteenth century are aware of the fact that these books, which copied the usage of manuscripts in their arrangement, printed all their letters designed for illumination in the ordinary type, while the red brush of the rubricator covered or disguised the small printed character which had been left as the guide to his pencil. Another item of the same suggestive character we may venture to place on record, although it may have already presented itself spontaneously to the mind of the reader, and that is, that the volume could not fail to be costly, at once from the quantity of parchment employed, as well as from the labour and care of transcription; and, in that case, that it could never be designed for a poor purchaser. It must have been calculated for some prince or wealthy churchman, some corporation, secular or ecclesiastical, to become the boast of their luxury, as well as the nurse of their devotion. What incident forbade its completion-the death or poverty of the transcriber; what revolution in church affairs or in the state; how it became private property, having had its origin in some monastic cell, or publisher's scriptorium,-whether by demise, or sale, or theft; or again, if originating in the ordinary avocations of the professional copyist-how it passed through hands, many or few, into the library of the Vatican, it is not ours to say. It would seem to ourselves to have been arrested in its course toward illuminative splendour by some adverse circumstance, and to have been lodged in Italy, its churches or its libraries, from first to last. We are under no obligations, arising out of known facts, to assign it a patent for travel beyond sea, and think it indeed most in accordance with circumstances, to conclude its birthplace to be Italy, and neither the orient nor the south.
