For the first time in around seven hundred years, three parts of the same manuscript have returned to the place from which their dispersal began. They come from Cividale del Friuli, Prague and Venice, and are now being presented together at Palazzo Meizlik in Aquileia, in the exhibition The Gospel of Mark. Seven Centuries. Three Fragments. A European Story, open until 25 April 2027.
The reunion will be complete for only a limited period. The originals held in Prague and Cividale can be displayed for the first six weeks; they will then be replaced by high-resolution digital reproductions. The Venetian reliquary case, by contrast, will remain on view for the entire duration of the exhibition. The fragility of the parchment therefore sets the conditions of the encounter: reconstructing the manuscript’s history does not mean ignoring what seven centuries have left on its material.
The Gospel of Mark originally belonged to the Codex Forojuliensis, also known as the Cividale Gospels, a Latin manuscript of the four Gospels probably produced in Ravenna in the sixth century and written in uncial script, the solemn form of writing used in sacred books. It arrived in Aquileia in the second half of the ninth century and was signed by Patriarch Theodemar.
The value of the codex, however, did not depend only on the text it contained. Between the ninth and tenth centuries, the margins of its pages were used as a Liber vitae, or Book of the Living. More than 1,500 names were recorded there, belonging to people whom a religious community undertook to remember in its prayers.
Alongside rulers and prominent figures, such as the Emperor Louis II, his consort Engelberga and Svatopluk, prince of Great Moravia, there were men and women connected in different ways to the monastery and its network of relationships. The book therefore brought together two forms of memory: the memory transmitted by the Gospel narrative and the memory entrusted to its pages by people who asked not to be forgotten.
Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the seven quires containing the Gospel of Mark, made up of forty leaves, were separated from the rest of the codex and bound independently. The new cover, made from gilded silver plates, gave the volume the appearance and function of a reliquary.
At least from the fourteenth century, an inventory of the patriarchal treasury documents the belief that those pages had been written directly by the evangelist Mark. Historical research, by contrast, dates them to the sixth century. It is important to keep the two levels distinct: attributing the text to Mark does not tell us who physically copied it, but it helps us understand the value ascribed to the manuscript in the Middle Ages.
Believing those pages to be the evangelist’s autograph transformed the book into a relic. It did not merely preserve his words: according to that tradition, it bore the physical trace of his hand. Possessing such testimony meant being able to claim a direct connection with the apostolic origins of Christianity.
This connection was especially important to Aquileia. Tradition attributed the first evangelisation of the northern Adriatic to Mark, helping to support the city’s religious role in its relations with Grado and, later, Venice. The manuscript therefore became part of a history in which devotion, territorial identity and institutional authority cannot easily be separated.
Its division also reflects this network of powers.
In 1354, Charles IV of Luxembourg obtained from the Patriarch of Aquileia, his half-brother Niccolò, several pages intended for St Vitus Cathedral in Prague. The fragment was placed in an ornate reliquary and kept near the tomb of St Wenceslas. Its presence established a symbolic relationship between the imperial court, Bohemia’s patron saint and the apostolic tradition of Mark.
Another part remained in Aquileia until the Venetian conquest of 1420 and was later transferred to Venice, the city that housed the evangelist’s relics and had built a fundamental part of its political identity around St Mark. The environmental conditions of the lagoon progressively compromised the legibility of the pages, which are now preserved in the Treasury of St Mark’s Basilica.
The rest of the codex is held in Cividale del Friuli. The three sections are not merely what remains of a divided book: they document the different meanings that the same object has acquired as it passed from one community and institution to another.
The Aquileia exhibition brings them together through collaboration between Italian and Czech civil, religious and museum institutions. The Prague fragment, considered the indivisible heritage of the Czech state and people, has left the country for the first time. This journey, too, belongs to the manuscript’s contemporary history: after being transferred as a sign of prestige and authority, it now returns to Aquileia through a cultural cooperation agreement.
For six weeks, it will be possible to see together the originals that time, political decisions and devotional needs have separated. Some will then return to the places that preserve them and be replaced by digital images.
The unity reconstructed by the exhibition does not, therefore, erase the fragmentation. Instead, it allows us to read it: in the surviving sections, in the names added to the margins, in the reliquaries built to protect them and in the institutions that still share responsibility for them today.
