Vimara and Juan

A most remarkable codex at León Cathedral known as the Vimara Bible is in fact only half a bible: the first of its two original volumes has been lost. The title is also only half its preferred name. Its scribe was the presbyter Vimara, although Juan, the illuminator, was the most singular talent in its creation in the year 920, so it is more fittingly termed the Bible of Vimara and Juan. In May 2010 there was a move to have the codex declared a national treasure and I quote from the regional government bulletin:

La Biblia mozárabe de la catedral de León fue compilada por el presbítero Vimara e iluminada por el diácono Juan en el año 920. Estaba compuesta de dos volúmenes, de los que sólo se conserva uno. El principal contenido de este códice es la segunda parte de una Biblia que comienza con el libro del profeta Isaías y continúa con los de Jeremías, Ezequiel y siguientes, además de los Evangelios incluyendo sus tablas de concordancia, las genealogías de los personajes bíblicos y algunos otros escritos, uno de ellos sobre la vida de San Froilán, patrón de la diócesis. En sus páginas se añadieron múltiples comentarios al trabajo de Juan y Vimara, algunos generados por los propios autores, muchos de ellos en árabe. Es la Biblia más antigua que se conserva y está considerada como una de las obras más importantes de la iconografía altomedieval hispánica. Esta creación se incluye dentro de una larga tradición de libros miniados que se inicia con los grandes scriptoria visigodos del siglo VII y que continuó con los códices realizados en la primera mitad del siglo X.

The only images that I have seen of this bible are on the Oronez portal. I am not sure what "las genealogías de los personajes bíblicos" means: they cannot be in diagram form, or they would have attracted attention as such. [Later addition: The "genealogical" text turns out to be the Inventiones Nominum, which sometimes appears in company with the Liber Genealogus. Its presence in León is signalled by Rouse (below).]

Seventy years ago, Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela first proposed that 10th-century Spanish bibles were regular in the way that they absorbed extra-biblical material. Unfortunately there are not that many 10th-century Spanish bibles to compare. With data that Professor Jose Carlos Martín of Salamanca has very kindly shared with me, I have compiled a little table of five bibles that contain either the Great Stemma or the Ordo Annorum Mundi.

GS	loc	init		OAM		location
missing			Vimara (920)	146r		after OT
missing			Cardeña (9-10 C)	312v		after OT
5v	front	verso	León (960)	395r		after OT
1v	front	verso	Calahorra (1183)	missing
1r	front	recto	San Juan de la Peña (11c)	missing
1r		recto	BNE Vitrina 14-2 ff 1-5 (10C)

Loc indicates where in the codex the stemma appears. Init indicates whether it begins on a recto (right-hand) or verso (left-hand) page. The sixth item is a mysterious five-page fragment, BNE Vitrina 14-2 ff 1-5, in the National Library in Madrid which may come from a bible. The fragment dates from the second half of the 10th century and its script suggests it comes from a scriptorium in the kingdom of León. The art historian John Williams thought it had been yanked out of a Beatus Commentary on the Apocalypse. He therefore included this manuscript of the "tables" in his book, The Illuminated Beatus (which was laudable and beneficial for scholarship), but he justified this with a whimsical argument (there are more such tables in Beatus manuscripts than in bibles) which he probably did not mean to be taken very seriously.

Bonifatius Fischer suggested the opposite: that it might come from a bible:

Finalmente planteemos con esta oportunidad una cuestión: los 5 folios con genealogías que hoy van encuaderndos al comienzo del manuscrito de Beato Madrid, Bibl. Nac. B-31, que antes pertenecía a S. Isidoro en León, y de los cuales Neuss demuestra que ni provienen de un Beato sino de una biblia, ¿son restos de la segunda biblia visigótica que en otro tiempo, según diversas fuentes, existía en S. Isidoro?

Teófilo Ayuso Marazuela believed there was a pattern whereby scribes placed the OAM between the Old and New Testaments, as happens in the San Isidoro de León bible. There are four other bibles, all damaged, which might have employed the same arrangement, and I have set them out in the table. Not all are from the 10th century, but one is entitled to cast the net wider to show how this hypothesis works. My own suspicion is that the Madrid fragment could have come from such a bible, especially if it did employ the Great Stemma as a frontispiece, starting with Adam on a recto page.

If BNE Vitrina 14-2 ff 1-5 is copied from any bible, the model cannot have been the León bible, nor whatever were the models for the 12th-century Calahorra and the mid-11th-century San Juan de la Peña bibles, because these three all have peculiar, eccentric versions of the tables. The fragment is also unlikely to be copied from the 9th- or 10th-century San Pedro de Cardeña Bible at Burgos, which has a much larger page size. But it could plausibly have been copied from the Bible of Vimara: their page size is almost identical, and the dating of BNE Vitrina 14-2 ff 1-5 is estimated at only a quarter-century or half-a-century away from the Vimara Bible's date, 920. The Vimara Bible is very finely executed, whereas the fragment is clumsily drawn with fewer colours but it would be interesting to compare images and see if the Vimara bible could have inspired the fragment's decoration. Unfortunately there does not seem to be any facsimile of the Vimara Bible.

Fischer, Bonifatius. “Algunas observaciones sobre et «Codex Gothicus» de la Real Colegiata de San Isidoro en Leôn.” Archivos leoneses : revista de estudios y documentación de los reinos hispano-occidentales XV (1961): 5–47.
Rouse, Richard, and Charles McNelis. "North African literary activity: A Cyprian fragment, the stichometric lists and a Donatist compendium." Revue d'histoire des textes 30 (2000): 189-238.