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Eight Centuries of Book Decoration: Mirroring the Past
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12015 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
2,250 Words |
| Author
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Nigel Thorp
Nigel Thorp is deputy keeper of Special Collections at the
Glasgow University Library in Scotland. |
The art of the illuminated manuscript has long been neglected as a supposedly minor art compared to wall or panel painting. For people unable to visit the manuscript reading rooms of national, university, or other public libraries and museums, this art remains quite literally a closed book. In recent decades, however, it has gained increasing acceptance as an independent branch of the visual arts. Several exhibitions have brought to the public the range of work that scribes, illuminators, and miniaturists produced in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, before the new fifteenth-century invention of printing changed the means of making books as radically as electronic procedures are doing today.
The survival of these early books has been aided by the fact that the written word has always been endowed with a particular mystique. This was especially true during the centuries when the majority of the population, including its rulers, were unlettered. Until the thirteenth century, learning was almost exclusively the province of the religious orders. Christian religion was based on the Word of God preserved in the Holy Bible. Large numbers of other books were the works of the Fathers of the Church interpreting Christian teaching. Gospel books themselves were decorated as objects of veneration as early as the sixth century, both as holy relics for religious orders and as icons with which missionaries could impress and instruct pagans. The survival of this tradition may be seen in the full-page pictures of the evangelists in an eleventh-century copy of the Greek Gospels.
Another factor that has helped in the preservation of these books, whether religious or secular, is that they were generally of a size that facilitated easy care. Compared with other personal possessions--such as garments, furnishings, plates, and ornaments that were worn out through use or discarded because of changing fashions--books of the period were far more likely to survive. The vellum, or parchment, on which they were written was itself highly durable, and the paintings on their pages have usually been well protected because books were normally kept shut and stored away in chests or cupboards, or horizontally on shelves, thereby keeping the harmful effects of light, air, dirt and atmospheric pollution over the centuries to a minimum.
Early Decoration
Most early decoration in manuscripts involved the embellishment of initial letters. This practice, appearing from the fifth century onward, was a means of increasing the legibility of texts. Before the
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