Imperial Ethiopian codex with ninety-two paintings

[Ethiopian Ge’ez codex]. The Life Of Mäba’a S’eyon. (With:) The Acts Of Gäbrä Krestos (St. Alexis).

€ 135.000,00

An especially fine Second Gondarine manuscript of two major Ethiopian hagiographical texts, preserved with an exceptional cycle of ninety-two paintings and distinguished by provenance from the library of Emperor Tewodros II. This copy matters not only for the scale of its illumination, but also for the unusually close documentation of its later history, publication, and disappearance from view.

The codex brings together the Life of Mäba’a S’eyon and the Acts of Gäbrä Krestos, the latter being the Ethiopian version of the life of St. Alexis. Copied in two hands but conceived as a single campaign of production, it preserves a coherent decorative programme throughout, with all paintings executed in the same accomplished Late or Second Gondarine style.

Mäba’a S’eyon, active in the reign of Zär’a Ya‘eqob, was remembered as the institutor of the Feast of the Crucifixion and as an evangeliser of the Gafat. The companion text on Gäbrä Krestos localises the saint’s career in Constantinople and Armenia, giving the Ethiopian redaction a markedly distinct shape within the wider eastern and western Alexis traditions.

The manuscript’s paintings, framed within broad coloured borders and often composed as multi-scene narratives without internal division, form a monumental visual cycle of the lives and miracles of both saints. Executed in the palette and figural idiom associated with the patronage of Empress Mentewwab and Iyasu II, they place the codex squarely within the high culture of eighteenth-century Gondarene book production.

Internal evidence preserves traces of changing ownership in the erased and rewritten invocations, where the name 'Täklä Haymanot' was inserted over an earlier reading, while at fol. 87r the original name 'Agnat’eyos' survives together with the name of the scribe, Mekha Giyorgis. The manuscript was later in the library of Tewodros II, was taken after the Battle of Magdala in 1868, and entered the celebrated collection of Lady Meux, for whom E. A. Wallis Budge published the text in 1898 with an English translation and colour plates.

Long considered lost by scholarship, the codex represents a defining survival of Ethiopian manuscript painting and hagiography, uniting imperial, scholarly, and collecting histories in a single object.