The Greek treatise “On the Noble and Illustrious Art of the Goldsmith”

The script consists of 69 recipes for the art of working in gold and silver, some of which are annotated. The original of the treatise, parts of which may date from the eleventh century, is lost. Two later copies have survived. The better-preserved version is found in Codex Parisinus Graecus 2327, which is a composite manuscript with older alchemical texts, made in Crete in 1478. The treatise is of considerable importance for Byzantine research, as it is the only known goldsmith’s treatise from Byzantium that forms a counterpart to the often-cited Latin work of Theophilus Presbyter from the twelfth century and is the only text of which we know to present several procedures. The text was first translated into French at the end of the nineteenth century. Jochem Wolters, a renowned expert on the history of goldsmithing, recognised its potential for technical history and translated it from French into German in 2004. He was unable to address philological aspects and problems in his goldsmithing commentary.

The research competences and infrastructures within the RGZM and the networking within the framework of the “Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus – Byzantium between Orient and Occident – Mainz/Frankfurt” offer the possibility of an interdisciplinary new edition. In this way, philological, historical, art-historical, archaeometallurgical, experimental archaeological and goldsmithing perspectives can be considered together for the first time.