The Codex Nuttall by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486136455
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

2. STYLISTIC AND TECHNICAL TRAITS OF THE CODEX NUTTALL

A. STYLE The Nuttall deerhide screenfold is 11.22 meters in length. It has 47 pages on each side of the screenfold, making a total of 94 rectangles or pages, each measuring 25.5 centimeters in width and 18.8 centimeters in height. Eighty-six of the pages have images painted on them.

There are two distinct styles of drawing represented by the two sides of the Nuttall. The colors of the obverse, which includes pages 1–41, are a light and dark red, blue, yellow, green, purple, brown, black, gray and the white of the stucco surface. The colors of the reverse, which includes pages 42–84, are similar, with the addition of yellow-orange instead of yellow and green (Robertson 1959: 17). The obverse is dark in tonality and dense in composition while the reverse is lighter in tonality and more open in composition.

There is a particular manner of page organization in the Nuttall, characterized by the use of vertical guidelines which divide each page into three or four vertical rectangles. In general the images on each page of the obverse and reverse are read from the bottom right-hand corner up to the top of the vertical guideline closest to the right-hand edge of the page and then down and up again at the next vertical guideline, or from upper right down to the end of the vertical guideline closest to the right-hand edge of the page, then up and down again at the next vertical guideline. Variations and irregularities to this scheme exist, but if one follows the meander indicated by the red lines and if one remembers that the sequence of events—like the entire codex—is connected, it is difficult to get lost.

Stylistically, the obverses of both the Codex Nuttall and the Codex Vienna resemble each other (Smith 1973: 11). Figural style and draftsmanship and the use of vertical guidelines are the most obvious stylistic similarities between the two codices.

On the basis of the stylistic traits mentioned above the Nuttall is dated as unquestionably a pre-Conquest manuscript.

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