BEATO DE TÁBARA

This manuscript is formed by two perfectly differentiated parts; the first one consists of 166 folios and its origin is unknown although it is considered it proceeds from a Leonese monastery and dated in the 10th century, and the second part consists only of two folios added later for what they must have been cut out for being larger than the rest; they supposedly belonged to another blessed, today disappeared, from the Monastery of St. Salvador de Tábara (Zaragoza), according to what one of them records.

In the last one of these two folios, a colophon explains in an excellent omega letter, in a way not lacking humour, that the blessed had been begun by master Magius in the monastery of Tábara, but when he died before having finished his task, this was continued by his disciple Emeterio and the nun Eude who finished it on July 27th 970. The other added folio has the image of the tower of Tábara, where the monastery of St. Salvador’s scriptorium and the calligraphists and miniaturists Senior, Emeterio and an assistant in the midst of their labour are drawn. Considered as one of the most interesting images in all Mozarabic miniature, from our end we use it as this web’s logo.

The information described, that corresponds to the disappeared blessed, of which only those two last pages have survived, has motivated that for a long time it was thought that it referred to the full manusript and for that reason it is still being called Blessed of Tábara, in spite it is unknown the Leonese scriptorium where the first part was created, that must have been of Mozarabic origin for the quantity of marginal notes in Arab that it has.

The history of this manuscript is unknown from the destruction of the monastery by Almanzor in 988, until after the disentailment of the 19th century when it became property of Ramón Álvarez de la Breña, archivist of León. Then it went to the high School of Diplomacy in Madrid and in 1872 to the National Historical Museum in Madrid where it is now preserved after a very thorough restoration due to the terrible
condition it got there.

The main manuscript, from which we know that it is the  work of an illuminator by the name of Monniu and an unknown copyist, is formed by the first 166 folios and has reached our times completely mutilated, to the extent that only 12 images have been preserved out of the more than a hundred and that out of those 12, five are very damaged and savagely cutout. However, during the Middle Ages it must have been considered as one of the most important blessed because many copies were made in the 12th and 13th centuries and thank those we may have an idea about the disappeared miniatures.

The Blessed of Tábara follows the more recent IIb phase of the illustrated version of 786, different to IIa, dated in 784, in which Magius was based for his Blessed of Escalada. For that reason it is considered as the origin of a series of later manuscripts, like the Blessed of Gerona, that also followed this last version.

Fot the characteristics an quality of the few miniatures that have survived, it is obvious that this blessed was created in a Leonese monastery where there were monks that perfectly knew the Arabic writing and in the middle of the 10th cntury, the most brilliant period of the Mozarabic miniature in this region.

Despite its deplorable state of conservation, with most of the miniatures gone, and the confusion about the last two pages, the wrongly called Blessed of Tábara has provided very valuable information on the Mozarabic miniature of our 10th century. In fact, thanks to these last two pages we are able to know Magius’ date of death and the handover to Emeterio of his title of archipictor of the monastery of Tábara, just before it was destroyed. We meet again Emeterio later, also with the help of the nun Ende, as authors of the Blessed of the Cathedral of Gerona, possibly the last piece of work of the scriptorium of Tábara, that would disappear a few years later.

But at the same time, the first part of the manuscript enables us to know Monniu, another miniaturist of great quality, although we cannot know in which monastery did he work nor even whether it was one of those we already know through other works or if it was a scriptorium of which we do not have any information so far. Nevertheless, this blessed, of unknown origin and created by an artist from which we lack further news, confirms the enormous quality that the Mozarabic miniature reached in the 10th century.