OLD BELIEVERS.

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Apocalypse, A stunning Old Believers' Apocalypse with the commentary of Andreas of Caesarea, produced around the time of Napoleon's Russian campaign, and formerly exhibited at the British Museum. Napoleon was one of numerous political and religious figures who had been successively identified with the Antichrist since the establishment of the Old Believers' community in the 17th century."Old Believer book culture inherited and developed an ancient tradition that had already manifested itself in the first century of Russian book production: the aesthetic perception of the book as a synthesis of the arts - verbal, visual, and sometimes musical" (Medvedeva, p. 70). While they saw printing itself "as a symbol of detested Tsarist authority" (Carey, p. 207), Old Believers also "rejected many liturgical and orthographic reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, […] and often held on to the oldest available editions and produced new texts in the oldest possible styles" (Rogers, p. 28). The more prosperous members of the communities patronised the production of finely illustrated and bound manuscripts, like the present, inspired by the European prints and religious iconography which were imported into Russia during the reign of Peter the Great.That of Archbishop Andreas of Caesarea (6th century) is the oldest Greek commentary on the Revelation, here in its Church Slavonic translation. The iconography of the Revelation was given "considerable impetus by the dissemination of western graph

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