Bible of Niketas

The Bible of Niketas is a monumental Bible manuscript consisting of several volumes, which was created in the late 10th century for a Byzantine court official named Niketas. The three surviving volumes are now located in Florence, Copenhagen, and Turin. They are all copies of a much older, late antique Bible from the 6th century. The text layout and the opulent, full-page miniatures that introduce the individual books of the Bible also reveal deliberate references to ancient book traditions. The Bible of Niketas is thus a wonderful example of the tradition-minded artistry of the heyday of the Macedonian Renaissance and reflects not least the self-image of the Byzantine emperors. The Bible manuscript also testifies to a high intellectual claim, as the ancient Greek Bible text was supplemented by an impressive apparatus of exegetical commentaries, which frames the sacred lines and sometimes takes on figurative forms. This complex content and the artistic sophistication of the text and images suggest that the work may have been produced by skilled hands in the imperial scriptorium itself. A masterpiece of early medieval Byzantine book art!