Hakob’s Gospels: The Life and Work of An Armenian Artist of the Sixteenth Century

96 pages, paperback, 300 x 240 mm, 100 colour illustrations
PRICE: £20.00
ISBN: 978 0 954901 47 9

By Timothy Greenwood and Edda Vardanyan

In the winter of 1586, Hakob Jughayets'i, one of Armenia's most celebrated illuminators, completed work on a Gospel Book with an extensive and extraordinary programme of narrative miniatures and marginal figures. Produced in an era of warfare between the Safavid and Ottoman empires over the possession of Armenia, and while Yakob himself was a wandering artist, this manuscript provides a compelling witness to the development of Yakob's artistic personality during a period of personal and political unrest. Tracing his work from the 1580s to the 1610, this groundbreaking study sets Yakob's extraordinary oeuvre within the political and artistic context of late sixteenth-century Armenia.

Timothy Greenwood is a lecturer at the University of St Andrew's.
Edda Vardanyan is a researcher attached to the Armenian National Library.