Page - 124 - in The Vienna Genesis - Material analysis and conservation of a Late Antique illuminated manuscript on purple parchment

124 The silver inks of the Vienna Genesis bifolio. The scribes used two major schemes of ruling: while the first always skips one line (Fig. 5 a), the second uses every line to write on, (folios 11–14) but sticks to the first scheme in the quire where the scribes changed (Fig. 5 b). Quire 7 was prepared using the ruling scheme of the first scribe, while folio 13 and 14 were already written by the second scribe. It seems that the scribes (or someone else) first prepared the whole quire with ruling marks before writing the text. In the Middle Ages it was common that the scribe himself executed the ruling before writing a text, but the workflow in Late Antiquity is unknown28. It can be assumed that the Vienna Genesis was produced in an artistic workshop, which was differ- ent from a fully organised medieval European scriptorium29. The size of the text block of the Vienna Genesis was not consistent within the whole manuscript, probably due to the different amount of text that had to be adjusted to the illuminations. The text block varies up to 20 mm from quire to quire, and to a minor extent of some millimetres from page to page within one quire as well. The parchment 28 Mazal, 1980, p. 41. 29 Diringer, 1982, p. 275. Fig. 5a: Different ruling schemes, 1–4. Fig. 5b: Different ruling schemes, 5–7. Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY 4.0