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f.1A, Double arch
f. 1B, Oviedo cross
f. 9r, Angels with Matthew’s gospel
f. 9v, St Mark the Evangelist enthroned and a standing witness
f. 2A, Genealogy of Sem
f. 3r, Genealogy of Abraham
f. 2C, Annunciation/Epiphany
f. 3A, God gives the book to the angel, who then gives it to John
f. 42r, The message to the Church of Ephesus
f. 44v, The message to the Church of Smyrna
f. 48v, The message to the Church of Pergamum
f. 51v, The message to the Church of Thyatira
f. 4A, The message to the Church of Sardis
f. 5A, The message to the Church of Philadelphia
f. 63r, The message to the Church of Laodicea
f. 8A, The angel with the first trumpet
f. 10A, The angel with the fifth trumpet
f. 96r, The angel with the second trumpet: the burning mountain is cast into the sea
f. 96v, The angel with third trumpet: the great, burning star
f. 9B, The angel with the fourth trumpet: the eclipse
f. 11B, The angel with the sext trumpet: the angels of the river Euphrates
f. 106r, The Antichrist kills the two witnesses
f. 13B, Tables of the Antichrist
Cardeña Beatus
"Unique and unrepeatable first edition, strictly limited to 987 numbered and authenticated copies"
Codex of the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña
f.1A, Double arch
From an architectural approach, the arch represents the entrance to the very holiest of places i.e. the church. Transferring this concept to the codex, it is identified as a type of temple, a sacred place in which the contents of the work are revealed to readers in order to teach and edify them by means of text and images. The arches symbolise the inside of the temple where the writer and illustrator carry out their mission aimed at readers, the equivalent of the faithful. The two horseshoe arches, the type recalled in the codex to evoke the 10th century, sit upon slender columns with plant-motif bases and capitals. Each arch houses another two arches, giving a notion of perspective emphasised by means of the thick, gold gilding upon said arches in the foreground. The layout of the framed arches with empty circles in the Manchester Beatus was considered by Williams to be undoubtedly the outcome of recycling a folio intended originally for the Genealogies, which led him to surmise that it was the model used for the Cardeña codex. It is in fact the unfinished folio from said codex which corresponds to the Genealogies (fol.7r in the Morgan Beatus ms. 429), in which heads of biblical characters are depicted inside the circles: a device repeated throughout the series. The circles form part of a diagram with four arches, which in the Manchester Beatus are reduced to two arches depicted on folio 1r. Unlike the Morgan Beatus, the double arch in the Cardeña Beatus opens the codex, a conceptual difference in comparison with Beatus 429.
«Unique and unrepeatable first edition,
strictly limited to 987 numbered and authenticated copies»
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