The frontispiece, depicting all four evangelists with Jesus Christ in the center, derides the authors in two ways: first, as if they are all casting an ancient Frankish spell against rocks and paper, and second, as if the evangelist Mark is represented by a duck rather than a lion. Similarly in the interior of the manuscript, Mark is depicted as a horse-headed creature, Luke is represented by a humanoid horned creature with wings, and John’s symbol, instead of being a majestic eagle, is a lowly vulture.
This blasphemous imagery would normally have never been allowed to survive in Christendom, but the Harkness Gospels were protected intact in the collection of a distinguished family until ownership passed to the family of Edward S. Harkness in 1926. The manuscript is now in a collection in New York, USA.





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