1 - ‘In the Image and Likeness of God’: The Dedication Monogram in the Calendar of 354 and Early Medieval Monogrammatic Initials

Summary

Late antique and early medieval monograms have traditionally been discussed by students of numismatics, diplomatics, and epigraphy, since coins, seals, charters, and epigraphic monuments were the most common media for monograms from the fourth to the tenth centuries. Manuscript scholars, meanwhile, have written little about this phenomenon for the simple reasons that monograms were relatively rare in late antique and early medieval manuscripts and that their use in decorated manuscripts was rather exceptional. The earliest surviving case of such usage, on the front page of the Calendar of 354, therefore deserves more academic discussion if we are to gain a proper understanding of fourth-century manuscript culture and its wider cultural contexts. Moreover, this early case exemplifies a monogrammatic mode of representation that became popular in late antique visual culture and contributed to the later appearance of a peculiar decorative element in early medieval decorated manuscripts, whereby certain initials were created from a sequence of letters in a monogram-like manner. The origins of such monogrammatic initials is a complex topic that warrants separate treatment elsewhere. My aim here is of somewhat limited nature. By taking the early medieval monogrammatic forms of Vere dignum and Te igitur as a point of comparison with the dedication monogram in the Calendar of 354, I seek to show that despite being divided by half a millennium these graphic devices display typological similarity in terms of their graphic composition, functions, and cognitive settings.

The Calligraphic Monogram in the Calendar of 354

The Calendar of 354 is a unique fourth-century manuscript in many respects – among other things, in greeting its late antique and medieval viewers with an impressive calligraphic monogram on the dedication page (Fig. 1). Even though the original decorated codex has not survived, its sophisticated layout is known to modern scholars in its entirety through early modern copies of another intermediary manuscript produced in the Carolingian period. As the text on the dedication page informs us, the late antique original was produced by Furius Dionysius Filocalus for a Roman noble named Valentinus. Valentinus is a somewhat obscure figure, though he might have belonged to an established aristocratic family of late imperial Rome, the Symmachi.