Commentary on the Apocalypse

Significant copies include the Morgan, Saint-Sever, Gerona, Osma, Madrid (Vitr 14-1), and Tábara Beatus codices.

[4] Considered together, the Beatus codices are among the most important Spanish manuscripts and have been the subject of extensive scholarly and antiquarian enquiry.

The leading expert John Williams writes:[10] "We even lack proof of his responsibility for the Commentary on the Apocalypse.

His attitude is one of realism about church politics and human pettiness, hope and love towards everyday life even when it is difficult, and many homely similes from his own time and place.

(For example, he compares evangelization to lighting fires for survival when caught far from home by a sudden mountain blizzard, and the Church to a Visigothic army with both generals and muleskinners.)

The features most associated with Beatus manuscripts are whole page and double spread illustrations with backgrounds in broad strips of bright, flat, primary colours.

These are not found in earlier manuscripts, where illustrations often occupy less than the width of a page, and figures have a blank background within a simple border.

[13] The San Millán Beatus was illustrated in two phases, over a century apart, and shows this stylistic progression within a single manuscript.

The "polychromatic striped backgrounds that characterize the so-called Mozarabic style of illumination" now appear; the Morgan Beatus is nearly complete, with 68 full-page miniatures, and 48 smaller, and so the best exemplar of this phase.

[17] Images new to Beatus manuscripts found in the Beatus and clearly taken from the León Bible of 960 (or a very similar MS) include a set of Evangelist portraits of a distinctive type, the text and decorative illumination of an extensive genealogy of Christ (over fourteen pages with about 600 names), and a set of images illustrating Jerome's Commentary on the Book of Daniel, the text of which was also included.The Morgan Adoration of the Lamb also takes distinctive features of the León Christ in Majesty.

[18] By the time of later manuscripts such as the Saint-Sever Beatus, probably from around 1150, the decorated initials and similar elements of ornament were in a clearly Romanesque style, and figures were rather better drawn, but the old compositions and features such as the large coloured bands persisted.

[21] This expected date, or 800 AD, was shared by many Christians at the time, although the papacy and church authorities discouraged such speculations.

[23] In continuity with previous commentaries written in the Tyconian tradition, and in continuity with St. Isidore of Seville and St. Apringius of Beja from just a few centuries before him, Beatus' Commentary on the Apocalypse focuses on the sinless beauty of the eternal Church, and on the tares growing among the wheat in the Church on Earth.

The earliest surviving fragment, at the abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, is already from about a century after the work was written.