Tomić Psalter

One of the three books that made the cultural brilliance of Ivan Alexander's reign — with the Vatican Manasses and the London Tetraevangelia. The sources are unanimous that the tsar cared about books as objects: he had a good eye, and he commissioned the three most splendid manuscripts of the age, not only in the Bulgarian cultural space.

The three were deliberately complementary: a world chronicle, the four Gospels, and a psalter — the whole of the knowledge a ruler and his family needed. Between them they carry 554 miniatures. Ivan Alexander already owned the Sofia Psalter of 1337; this one replaced a well-made but unillustrated book with a fully painted one.