Imaging the Cosmos: The Christian Topography by Kosmas Indikopleustes

Abstract

The Christian Topography by Kosmas Indikopleustes was both one of the most perplexing and one of the most elaborately illustrated manuscripts of the Byzantine era. Written in the sixth-century, the manuscript survives in three copies: Vatican Greek 699, a ninth-century codex in the Vatican collections, and two eleven-century copies, Sinai Greek 1186 in the library of Monastery of St. Katherine in Sinai, and Pluteus IX.28, in the possession of the Laurentian Library in Florence. The work attempted nothing less that the replacement of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system of the universe with a cosmological model the author thought was more in harmony with Christian scripture. The text was illustrated with many unique diagrams of the cosmos, as well as several narrative biblical images. Long disparaged as an obscure work by an ignorant author, scholarship focused instead on the ornate miniatures. Kurt Weitzmann and other scholars advanced the theory that the illustrators appropriated many images, particularly the narrative images from book five, from an earlier source, possibly a lost Octateuch tradition. The cosmological diagrams were seen as a novelty and largely ignored. This avenue of research resulted in a bifurcation of the text and image in scholarship of the manuscript, in which the illustrative program was seen as ad hoc or derivative and unrelated to the text or Kosmas' theories. After having thoroughly examined all three surviving manuscripts in person, I have come to a different conclusion. By exploring the author's use of language and typology, I believe I have demonstrated that all the images, even the problematic narrative ones, relate directly to Kosmas' theories and were probably original. Kosmas was not a fundamentalist or a "know-nothing" as previously described but a cosmopolitan and flexible thinker deeply immersed in the Christological debates of his era. Viewed in that context, The Christian Topography used a holistic approach where images and visual imagery were indispensable to the author's arguments.