Liuthar Gospels

The manuscript comprises 256 parchment pages of 29.8 x 21.5 centimetres containing the Vulgate text of the Four Gospels of Hieronymus written with black ink in a single column of Carolingian minuscule.

For the first time in Medieval illumination, 21 pages of upright miniatures with scenes from the Life of Jesus were added, some with two registers one under the other.

Despite the small size of these scenes, the figures appear monumental, framed by arches, with all the backgrounds in gold leaf – another novelty.

Above and below in golden capitals on a purple background is a dedicatory inscription in Leonine Hexameter, reading: "Emperor Otto, may God clothe your heart with this book.

The image on the opposite page shows Otto on a throne supported by Tellus, the personification of the Earth on a background of goldleaf.

This is confirmed by the Hand of God surrounded by a blue halo and superimposed on a cross, which crowns the Emperor, and also by his arms which are outspread in a pose of crucifixion.

This cover measures 30.8 x 23.7 centimetres and consists of a wooden core, a sheet of silver, and Byzantine ivories from the middle of the tenth century.

The ivories are meant to serve as the folding wings of the ivory relief of the golden book cover of the Treasury Gospels and have no connection whatsoever with the silverwork evangelists and angels In 1886, the master of the Aachen Minster[3] college, Heinrich Böckeler[4] found the so-called Aachen Fragment in the Liuthar Gospels, which was dated orthographically to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries.