The Illustrated Life of Apollonius and Tarsia. A “Papyrus-style” Narrative in Ottonian Art

Made around the turn of the first millennium the Apollonius pictus manuscript of the Hungarian National Library preserves the oldest known illustration cycle of a Late Antique adventure story, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri. Until very recently the only art historian who recognized the importance of the manuscript was Kurt Weitzmann, who believed that the style of the thirty-eight red line-drawings of the manuscript revealed classical ancestors, which, within the theoretical framework Weitzmann constructed, meant that the images were derived from a lost Late Antique original. Leaving aside the problems of a speculative archetype my paper is an attempt to unfold the textual and visual associations, both Late Antique and Ottonian, the manuscript evoked in the circle of its medieval readers. To this end I investigate the possible visual messages of the “papyrus-style” layout-structure of the manuscript, and that of the characteristic motifs of the single images.