Vienna Dioscorides Endpaper Peacock - A painting of a peacock on a wall

The Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides is an early 6th-century Byzantine Greek illuminated manuscript of an even earlier 1st-century CE work, De materia medica by Pedanius Dioscorides in uncial script. It is an important and rare example of a late antique scientific text. The manuscript was produced c. 512 C.E. for the imperial princess Anicia Juliana in Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire. The manuscript has 491 folios with more than 400 images of plants and animals. Its lifelike illustrations stand in stark contrast to the common perception of Byzantine art as mostly spiritual. The manuscript remained in Constantinople until the late 1560s. Plant names written in Greek minuscule, Latin, Old French, Hebrew, and Arabic reveal its continued use. It was copied many times and restored in 1406 when it resided in the Monastery of St. John Prodromos. The Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to the Ottoman court in the 1550s saw the manuscript while in Constantinople and encouraged its eventual purchase by Emperor Maximilian II, noting the contents, illustrations, and old age of the manuscript. In 1592 it was deposited in the Imperial Library in Vienna, which later became the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), where the Vienna Dioscurides currently resides.