From David. H. Wright, The Vatican Vergil: A Masterpiece of Late Antique Art (Berkeley, 1993), 1-2.

The Vatican Vergil is the most important surviving ancient example of an illustrated book of classical literature. We have several early illustrated biblical manuscripts, but the Vatican Vergil, having been made in Rome within a couple of decades of the year 400, is older than all but one of these, and because of its classical contents it draws on still older traditions. We also have a few ancient illustrated scientific texts, but they necessarily allow only a limited range of artistic expression. For illustrated classical literature we have only two other ancient manuscripts, both from later in the fifth century: the Ambrosian Iliad is a sadly damaged set of miniatures cut out of a book once generally comparable in character to the Vatican Vergil, while the Codex Romanus of Vergil is a large and pretentious book, but it has carelessly painted illustrations that in many aspects suggest the transition from classical to medieval bookmaking. Therefore a close study of the Vatican Vergil offers our best opportunity to find out how a fine illustrated book was made in classical antiquity, how it embodied long-standing traditions of classical art.

This study must be undertaken carefully, with great patience. First there is the problem of the sad condition of our book (now Vat. lat. 3225 in the Vatican Library). Its seventy-five surviving folios are scattered fragments, sometimes a single isolated leaf, sometimes a cluster of four or five successive leaves; they now contain fifty illustrations, some of them badly damaged. But from these fragments it is easy to reconstruct the form of the original book. It must have contained, as was customary at the time, all the canonical works of Vergil but no introductions or other accessory texts, and so it comprised about 440 folios bound in one volume. Extrapolating from the surviving illustrations and the traces of pigment from lost paintings, we can conclude that there were about 28o illustrations. The book was a precious copy of Vergil, fully illustrated but reasonably handy in size, made to be read and enjoyed. Where we have a relatively well-preserved group of successive folios we can appreciate directly the character of the book, but we must make a deliberate effort to imagine it in perfect condition and in its full original extent.

A fine book of this kind was still a fairly new invention when the Vatican Vergil was produced; indeed, no surviving book of comparable quality is significantly older. Previously the standard form of book had been the papyrus roll, but that form had serious disadvantages, especially for the luxury market. Each book of the Aeneid or of the Georgics required a separate roll, while all ten Eclogues could be written on one roll. A reader unrolled the roll from the right hand into the left while reading the columns of text, and then rolled it back up before putting it away. Papyrus has a relatively rough surface that absorbs ink well and also holds pigments reasonably well, but it was much less appropriate than parchment for fine books. Papyrus is also relatively fragile, and therefore with constant use a roll would wear out rather quickly. A luxury roll could be made of parchment, but all the unrolling and rerolling hastened the process of causing the pigments of an illustration and even the ink of the text to flake off the smooth polished surface of the parchment. Once it was invented, the new codex form-our normal book-had enormous advantages, not only because it made handling easier, allowing a reader to turn quickly to a particular passage, but also because it permitted much more elaborate paintings. The heavy application of pigment for an Elaborately decorated frame or a fully painted background, impractical in a roll, could now be used to make book illustrations that in style are miniature versions of the wall paintings known from Pompeii and Rome.

The codex first came into use in the first century after Christ, but it was a rarity in the beginning, almost a plaything. Soon the Christians adopted the codex as an appropriate form for their Holy Book, but the roll continued in general use even in the fourth century. For classical literature it seems that only in the fourth century did the codex become a generally accepted form of book. When the Vatican Vergil was produced, therefore, it was probably one of the first luxury editions of Vergil in codex form. It was most likely copied from a set of rolls; while this supposition means little for the transmission of the text, it is very important for our consideration of the illustrations.

The scriptorium that produced the Vatican Vergil had a well-organized group of specialists. One master scribe copied the entire text and planned the illustrations by leaving spaces for them at certain places in the text. Then three different artists (as we shall discover) filled in the illustrations, working from appropriate iconographic models, relying on them both as a convenience and out of respect for tradition. If, as we shall realize is very likely, our painters had in front of them a set of illustrated rolls to serve as iconographic models for the Aeneid, the illustrations they studied and adapted must have been very different from their finished work in technique, and therefore in some aspects of style. Rolls of this kind had small illustrations in "papyrus style, " placed in the columns of text just before the verses illustrated, showing only a minimal selection of figures and other objects essential for telling the story; they had no decorated frames and no continuously painted backgrounds or landscape settings. Such features in the Vatican Vergil, intrinsically appropriate to the more luxurious kind of book made possible by the new codex format, must have been the contribution of our painters. Even if the immediate model studied in this workshop was already in codex form, there can be no doubt that most of the iconography of our illustrations descends from ancient rolls. This observation helps us understand both the skill and the originality of our artists. They produced what we now recognize as the finest surviving example of a classical literary text illustrated in the ancient tradition, but they took advantage of the relatively new codex format and worked in what was at the time a modern book art.