The ‘Paradigm’

The manner of how the story of Creation was depicted in Western medieval church decoration has been a point of concern since 1888, when Johann J. Tikkanen analysed the atrium mosaics of San Marco in Venice with reference to the so-called Cotton Genesis. The Cotton Genesis was a sumptuous early-Christian manuscript of the first Book of the Septuagint Bible, heavily damaged during a fire in 1731. The codex had some 360 pictures on 221 folios, which are today only partially known from fragments – a few watercolours and engravings – thanks to a formidable achievement of philological reconstruction (Fig. 8.1). In his major study of the manuscript, Kurt Weitzmann sharpened Tikkanen’s observations, and in doing so provided ‘a heavy superstructure of assumptions concerning the very origins of Christian art’.

Weitzmann thought that early-Christian illustrated manuscripts were the primary sources for much of the monumental art created during the Middle Ages, and that the Cotton Genesis played a principal role because it seemed to be the centre of a vast family of similar manuscripts. The Cotton Genesis became the ‘paradigm’, displacing the Vienna Genesis and the Ashburnham Pentateuch, which Weitzmann argued had little influence on the majority of medieval Genesis cycles. In other words, the Cotton Genesis was widely considered to be the closest derivation of an archetype believed to lie at the root of a stemma codicum of a central pictorial tradition. This Cotton Genesis ‘recension’ also encompassed two Creation sequences produced in Norman Sicily, one preserved in the Cappella Palatina in Palermo and the other in the nearby cathedral of Monreale. We must consider first the issues surrounding the identification of early visual models and their transmission before we can turn to the specific context that made these exceptional mosaic programmes possible.