The image here is from the Codex Amiatinus (click on the thumbnail for an enlargement), created in Britain in the eighth century but probably imitating a large Bible produced at Cassiodorus' Vivarium monastery on the Ionian Sea two hundred years earlier. This portrait expressly depicts the scribe Ezra, he who restored the Law to the Jewish people after the Babylonian captivity, but the arrangement of books on the bookshelves and labels visible on their spines when closely examined suggest the disposition of texts of scripture known from Cassiodorus' own library through his work the Institutiones. Accordingly, many scholars take this image to be a thinly-veiled portrait of the aged Cassiodorus himself.