“Merovingian and Early Carolingian Art”: The Gundohinus Gospels
The Gundohinus Gospels (Autun, Bibliotheque municipale ms 3) date from about 30 years later than the Trier Gospels and carry us over into the Carolingian period with their precise dating of 754. Rather than looking westward to England and the Northumbrian manuscript tradition, the Gundohinus Gospels look southward to Italy.
The French website, Enluminure, provides color photos of each element of decoration in the Gundohinus Gospels(click on Autun in the left sidebar, then ms. 003), and a monograph by Larry Nees, Gundohinus Gospels (Medieval Academy Books)
Folio 12v shows a Christ in Majesty, an iconography that always merits review and new analysis. The Christ in Majesty in the Codex Amiatinus from the class on Anglo-Saxon art offers a particularly apt comparison. The standing Evangelists on folios 186v-187r and 187v-188r point more directly southward to the standing prophets and apostles of the middle register of the long walls at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. Their grouping together at the end of the codex, rather than each prefacing his own Gospel also warrants comment.
Finally, Nees translates the Colophon, which names the patron, Fausta- an abbess (one must here wonder why they are not called the Fausta Gospels?); the illuminator- Gundohinus; his monastery- Vosevio; and the intended reader- the nuns of Fausta’s monastery. As Gundohinus dates the completion of the manuscript according to the reign of Pepin, he secures the Gundohinus Gospels as one of the earliest surviving Carolingian manuscripts.