Since the illuminated folios at the beginning of the Rabbula Gospels have been proved to be a later addition to the original manuscript, the main geographic and chronological cornerstone for the history of Syriac illumination has vanished. The paper attempts to draw a preliminary history of miniature in Syria, by using such less famous manuscripts, as the 6th century Diyarbakır Gospels and the Paris Bible syr. 341. The second part of the paper focuses on a group of 13th century manuscripts of the so-called Syriac Renaissance: the Lectionary of Theodoros Dioskoros; two Lectionaries in London and Berlin; and two Lectionaries probably from the Monastery of Mar Mattai near Mosul. Moreover, the contemporary apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy in the Laurentian Library in Florence is also considered.
