Word: vellum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...story then begins with the first revival of the arts under Charlemagne, shown in the ancient Rheims Gospel and the "Golden Latin Gospels, called "of Henry the Eighth." Both being of the ninth century, are in Byzantine style, the latter all in letters of burnished gold on purple vellum, is among the most beautiful and important documents here. Of two centuries later, with Byzantine traits still persisting, are the German Gospels from Salzburg...
...ivory, preferably from tusks of a live elephant. The ivory was smoothed with pumice stone, soaked in water until pliable. When pressed stiff and flat each slab was cut for size. Omitting the gum, glycerine or honey the ancients used to make paint stick to chicken skin, mutton bone, vellum or copper, 20th Century miniaturists daubed on pure water colors. Then they had something they could sell, if a portrait, for from $200 to $800, if a still life, for $25 up. Last week droves of old ladies pressed their noses close to the Grand Central Art Galleries' walls...
Soon after the British Museum bought from the Soviet Government its famed Codex Sinaiticus (TIME, Jan. 1), a campaign was begun to raise half the cost ($511,250) by public subscription. The Codex's vellum pages of Old and New Testament in Greek were placed on view in the British Museum. Peering at them an old lady cackled: "Have they ever been translated...
First of all, as to the tale, dear to preachers' hearts, that Tischendorf rescued the precious vellum leaves from a waste basket, as they were being used to kindle a fire. . . . Vellum is a form of leather, you know; and can you imagine any one's kindling a fire with leather? And did you never smell burning shoes...
Nosing about the East after biblical lore in 1844 a German scholar named Constantine Tischendorf traveled through the Sinai Peninsula and up to a lonely Orthodox Greek monastery atop Mount St. Catherine.* There in a wastebasket he came across a bundle of 43 stray vellum leaves which a monk had tossed aside for lighting fires. Scholar Tischendorf recognized the vellum leaves as fragments of an ancient Greek biblical text. He asked for more. The St. Catherine monks showed him some, refused to part with them. Scholar Tischendorf took home what he had, published it as the Codex Friderico-Augustanus...