The Princeton Garrett 6 Evangelists Revisited, The Kurt Weitzmann Lecture by Lawrence Nees (University of Delaware), Princeton University, March 11, 2019, 5:00 pm

The image of the Evangelist Luke from the Garrett 6 Gospels manuscript in the Princeton collection graces the cover of Illuminated Greek Manuscripts from American Collections, the 1973 exhibition edited by Gary Vikan in honor of Kurt Weitzmann. It was an appropriate choice, being beautiful and in the Princeton collection. The manuscript and all its miniatures, including Christ and Mary, figure also in Weitzmann’s first book, devoted to Byzantine book painting, published before he took up his position in Princeton. Nancy Sevcenko’s entry in the recent catalogue of Greek manuscripts at Princeton is wonderful, but it would be useful to put these images in a broader context beyond Greek manuscripts. The recently discovered illustrated ninth-century Gospels in Arabic with standing Evangelist portraits among the “New Finds” at Mt. Sinai also connects in a way with Weitzmann’s long involvement with that remarkable monastery, and suggests the desirability of considering the Garrett 6 images in relationship to early medieval Gospels manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Coptic, Ge’ez and now Arabic.  The wide distribution of the type suggests the possible desirability of shifting paradigms from stemmatic derivation from archetypal originals toward envisaging complex networks of contacts among artists and patron in the early medieval period.