Chronograph of 354


The Chronograph of 354, also known as the Calendar of 354, is a compilation of chronological and calendrical texts produced in 354 AD for a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus by the calligrapher and illustrator Furius Dionysius Filocalus. The original illustrated manuscript is lost, but several copies have survived. It is the earliest dated codex to have full page illustrations. The term Calendar of Filocalus is sometimes used to describe the whole collection, and sometimes just the sixth part, which is the Calendar itself. Other versions of the names are occasionally used. The text and illustrations are available online.
Amongst other historically significant information, the work contains the earliest reference to the celebration of Christmas as an annual holiday or feast, on, although unique historical dates had been mentioned much earlier, notably by Hippolytus of Rome during 202–211.

Transmission from antiquity

The original volume has not survived, but it is thought that it still existed in Carolingian times, by the 8th–9th centuries. A number of copies were made at that time, with and without illustrations, which in turn were copied at the Renaissance.
The most complete and faithful copies of the illustrations are the pen drawings in a 17th-century manuscript from the Barberini collection. This was carefully copied, under the supervision of the great antiquary Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, from a Carolingian copy, a Codex Luxemburgensis, which was itself lost in the 17th century. These drawings, although they are twice removed from the originals, show the variety of sources that the earliest illuminators used as models for manuscript illustration, including metalwork, frescoes, and floor mosaics. The Roman originals were probably fully painted miniatures.
Various partial copies or adaptations survive from the Carolingian renaissance and Renaissance periods. Botticelli adapted a figure of the city of Treberis who grasps a bound barbarian by the hair for his painting, traditionally called Pallas and the Centaur.
The Vatican Barberini manuscript, made in 1620 for Peiresc, who had the Carolingian Codex Luxemburgensis on long-term loan, is clearly the most faithful. After Peiresc's death in 1637 the manuscript disappeared. However some folios had already been lost from the Codex Luxemburgensis before Peiresc received it, and other copies have some of these. The suggestion of Carl Nordenfalk that the Codex Luxemburgensis copied by Peiresc was actually the Roman original has not been accepted. Peiresc himself thought the manuscript was seven or eight hundred years old when he had it, and, though Mabillon had not yet published his De re diplomatica, the first systematic work of paleography, most scholars, following Meyer Schapiro, believe Peiresc would have been able to make a correct judgement on its age. For a full list of manuscripts with copies after the originals, see the external link.

Contents

was the leading scribe or calligrapher of the period, and possibly also executed the original miniatures. His name is on the dedication page. He was also a Christian, living in a moment that lay on the cusp between a pagan and a Christian Roman Empire.
The Chronography, like all Roman calendars, is as much an almanac as a calendar; it includes various texts and lists, including elegant allegorical depictions of the months. It also includes the important Liberian Catalogue, a list of Popes, and the Calendar of Filocalus or Philocalus, also known as the Philocalian Calendar, from which copies of eleven miniatures survive. Among other information, it contains the earliest reference to Christmas and the dates of Roman Games, with their number of chariot-races.
The contents are as follows. All surviving miniatures are full-page, often combined with some text in various ways:
On December 25: "·INVICTI··XXX" – "Birthday of the unconquered, games ordered, thirty races" – is the oldest literary reference to the pagan feast of Sol Invictus
At AD 1: "Hoc cons. dominus Iesus Christus natus est VIII kal. Ian. d. Ven. luna xv." – "When these were consuls, Lord Jesus Christ was born 8 days before the kalends of January on the day of Venus Moon 15" – is a historical reference
Line 1: "VIII kal. Ian. natus Christus in Betleem Iudeae" – "Eighth day before the kalends of January Birth of Christ in Bethlehem of Judea" – is the oldest reference to Jesus' birth as an annual feast day