115
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_13
Chapter 13
Codex Sinaiticus
13.1 The Holy Mountain
Our preconceptions of paradise slide hierarchically from some perfect, pinioned
place—a St. Kitts or Litla Dimun in their aboriginal “pristine” state—toward its
ideal (a Van Eyck painting), which is a subset of an idea that renders Utopia to scale,
human interactions with the Divine. Or, if one prefers, the idea is the subset of the
ideal. At the same time, few species details were ignored on canvases of the
Renaissance: a Jackass penguin, African lovebird, macaws, gray herons and the
Eurasian bittern,
1
golden-lion tamarins, every tree, and flower species imaginable: a
veritable pictorial inventory of Noah’s Ark. Jan Breughel the Elder painted nearly
800 windows on these easily blurred semantics, paradise scenes scattered across so
many floral arrangements, feasts of the Gods, summer harvests, and communities in
the midst of their gaieties along a river bank.
2
He and his family—a veritable dynasty
of paradise-related portraitures—were betrothed to a singular motif that engaged
viewers in contemporaneous political, religious, and all entablatures human. His
paradise collectives began in earnest with his 1594 painting, “The Creation with
Adam,” at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.
3
Brughel’s work is always contextualized, and much of that scenery is Biblical, a
fascinating link directly to the Sinai Peninsula and the oldest thriving monastic
library and gallery of icons in the world.
As succinctly summarized by the Codex Sinaiticus Project, there are more than
400 leaves in the surviving Codex, including the hand-copied half of the Old
Testament and Apocrypha, together known as the Septuagint, or the first Greek
translation directly from the Hebrew originals, in addition to all of the New
1 See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber Kolb,
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 27.
2 See the 812 images in the http://janbrueghel.net/
3 op.cit., See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber
Kolb, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 47.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_13
Chapter 13
Codex Sinaiticus
13.1 The Holy Mountain
Our preconceptions of paradise slide hierarchically from some perfect, pinioned
place—a St. Kitts or Litla Dimun in their aboriginal “pristine” state—toward its
ideal (a Van Eyck painting), which is a subset of an idea that renders Utopia to scale,
human interactions with the Divine. Or, if one prefers, the idea is the subset of the
ideal. At the same time, few species details were ignored on canvases of the
Renaissance: a Jackass penguin, African lovebird, macaws, gray herons and the
Eurasian bittern,
1
golden-lion tamarins, every tree, and flower species imaginable: a
veritable pictorial inventory of Noah’s Ark. Jan Breughel the Elder painted nearly
800 windows on these easily blurred semantics, paradise scenes scattered across so
many floral arrangements, feasts of the Gods, summer harvests, and communities in
the midst of their gaieties along a river bank.
2
He and his family—a veritable dynasty
of paradise-related portraitures—were betrothed to a singular motif that engaged
viewers in contemporaneous political, religious, and all entablatures human. His
paradise collectives began in earnest with his 1594 painting, “The Creation with
Adam,” at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.
3
Brughel’s work is always contextualized, and much of that scenery is Biblical, a
fascinating link directly to the Sinai Peninsula and the oldest thriving monastic
library and gallery of icons in the world.
As succinctly summarized by the Codex Sinaiticus Project, there are more than
400 leaves in the surviving Codex, including the hand-copied half of the Old
Testament and Apocrypha, together known as the Septuagint, or the first Greek
translation directly from the Hebrew originals, in addition to all of the New
1 See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber Kolb,
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 27.
2 See the 812 images in the http://janbrueghel.net/
3 op.cit., See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber
Kolb, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 47.