Why do the tinted drawings on the 188 preserved folios of the codex known as the Velislav Bible look the way they do? That is, according to Michael Baxandall, a question art historians could be and should be able to answer. In order to find the answer, it is necessary to study the codex from a number of perspectives, those presented in the chapters of this book. I will deal with one of them by asking: What was the practical function of the codex at the time of its creation? I assume that such a function will undoubtedly have left a major imprint on the appearance of the image. We might also say that the practical function of the visual-art work in question, a picture book, is in itself that very element which, within the work's complex structure, connects it in an important way to historical social practice. What I mean here by ‘practical function’ is that to which seemingly trivial questions are related: What was the book used for? For what purpose was it created? What were its potential users able to do with it? How did they use it? It is obvious that in the field of medieval studies we have to be satisfied with a relatively small degree of certainty that most often leaves us only with more-or-less convincing hypothetical assumptions. The influence that practical function had on the final form of the image seems, however, to be so significant that investigation is at least worth attempting.

Although the scholars who studied the Velislav Bible in the past also, of course, asked the question concerning the function of the codex and its illuminations, it had a different significance in their methodological approach. Their identification of the codex as an educational book is insufficiently specific. Art-historical literature on medieval Christian art has long used the category of didactics to show the difference between the nature of medieval images and of modern and contemporary images, in the latter of which artistic (aesthetic) function and the expression of the author's subjectivity prevail.

The classification of some medieval images as devotional images (Andachtsbilder), had, after all, the same purpose.