This division of our matter is the largest, and is also the most interesting to the majority of students and collectors. In beginning it, some repetition will be necessary in order to bring the subject as a whole before the reader.
Between the ninth century and the sixteenth, the multiplication of MSS. in Europe was very great, but comparatively few of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh have been preserved. Beautiful examples of blended writing and decoration were produced in England in the ninth century by Anglian and Irish calligraphers in the north, and by Saxon writers in the south. In York and Durham, and Lindisfarne, the style and the motifs of ornament were still thoroughly Irish ; in the south, although the late Roman had conquered the Celtic, their collision had produced a singularly fine type of illumination, reminiscent of Byzantine work, but much more free and natural. That art had already beautified the Carolingian French school; in the Carolingian German its influence appears in a weaker and ruder form. When with the tenth century France and Germany emerged as two distinct nations from the chaos of the Frankish empire, their modes of book-decoration began to diverge. The rudeness of an earlier time remains, with a good deal of spirit, in the illustrative designs produced in Germany; the beauty of French work began to decay, while the English was at its best. Winchester, Canterbury, and Glastonbury were the real centers of English art at the middle of the tenth century; the Norsemen having destroyed the Anglo-Irish monasteries in the north. This south English school is considered to have benefited materially by the technical superiority of French methods. What the north English schools of York and Lindisfarne had given to Tours in the eighth century, came back to Winchester at the end of the ninth, refined and embellished. Thus the supremacy of English art was assured at a time when French art was declining. The great variety, however, in all countries, of work done by different men, renders it difficult to draw general deductions. The calligraphic decoration of " Yisi-gothic" and " Lombardic " manuscripts during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries is visibly Celtic in origin and style. Their pictorial illustration is sometimes very striking, and indicates the existence of several central schools of design in Europe. The English, the French, the German, the Spanish, and the Italian, had all certain qualities in common, but the first two were most nearly akin. The other three schools produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries books containing pictures, in which the composition is more remarkable than the drawing, and the painting is full of barbaric contrasts of color. At all times, fine work was to be found in Italy, but only in isolated examples, and Italy as a whole underwent the same barbarisation as the other countries. From that stage the English and the French were the first to emerge. They can hardly be said to have revived any former state of art in connection was with them a real creation. The frequent reference to * Byzantium as having supplied the models for European illuminated work is misleading. The first sign of actual contact with Byzantium is in the early part of the ninth century, when certain pictures produced in Carolingian MSS. show that the painters had been made aware of the existence of similar Byzantine work. Arid that is actually all that can be referred to as direct imitation of Byzantine art. The magnificent early examples of chrysography on purple vellum were not Byzantine but Easter n-lloman, and the Koman traditions of the Eastern capital lingered on into the ninth century, having begun to grow weaker at the end of the sixth. Italy was nearer and more potent in its influence upon barbaric art than Byzantium, arid there was little difference in book-decoration between East Kome and West Rome till after the time of Justinian ; so far as the cultivation of the arts was concerned. Consequently there is no need to look to Byzantium as having supplied models for the rest of Europe to follow. There is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between the livres de luxe of the two Koman empires, and those of the new nations which began with Irish work about A.D. 600, and ended with Italian and French work about 1550. The former were books written in gold, perhaps ; perhaps decorated with red ink only; illustrated, maybe, with a picture or with pictures. The latter were books of which the principal characteristic was not their bookishness but their decorativeness. A set scheme of ornament sustained from beginning to end, with due proportion in the intervals, in which even the pictorial designs were subordinate to the decorative plan, constituted the value of the illuminated books of the European middle ages.
Bibles and liturgical books in the twelfth century are remarkable for their large size and the quantity of decoration with which they were produced. In Germany, the method of ornament still repeats the Anglo-Saxon type derived from "Carolingian work, and the handwriting is still Carolingian, but the letters lean forward instead of being upright, their forms are narrowed and chiselled off by short sharp terminal strokes that give an appearance of angularity. (An example of the art is given on plate 21.) In Spain, the beautiful round "Visigothic" letters are still retained, with large initials of interlaced Celtic pattern, and the illustrative pictures (if there are any) have the same style as had been developed some centuries earlier in Aquitaine. The German and the Spanish have a sort of resemblance by reason of their common origin, but more especially because of the striking combination of green and yellow in the paintings, the note of yellow apparently being strongest in the latter, and of green in the former. The use of green tints predominates likewise in English work of the eighth twelfth centuries, but became much more sparing under the influence of the French school which, after the eleventh century, began to avoid indulgence in that color. It never lost its favorite place in German art, and the MSS. of Holland and Flanders only dropped it when they began to assimilate French methods in the fourteenth century. England in the twelfth century produced much finer work than the French. In fact the English school of that century was the parent of nearly all the art of the following century. Both in calligraphy and in pictorial designs, it forestalled the work done in the whole of Western Europe between 1200 and 1300, which has rendered the thirteenth century the most noteworthy in the history of illustrated MSS. The mode and style of drawing, unfinished by illumination, which were practiced in England towards the close of the thirteenth century, may be examined in plate 10. Italian work of the same time is shown in plate 11 to have been much more barbaric and unskillful. The difference between English twelfth-century work and that of Europe in the thirteenth century consisted in the large and ample freedom of hand which marks the former and the delicate minuteness which characterizes alike the writing and the miniatures of the latter. As for style and quality of work, there is scarcely any difference between them. This new English school, so admirable in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had grown up over the decline of the Anglo-Saxon phase, which, fine as it was, had still somewhat of a barbaric air about it. The conquest of the Saxon monarchy by a Duke of Normandy in the eleventh century, and the succession in the twelfth of a Count of Anjou who united under his sceptre England, Normandy, and Aquitaine, made this country the centre of French art and literature for a considerable period. Hence the almost complete identity of the modes of writing and ornamentation between English and French work in the thirteenth century. In Central and South-eastern France the style varied somewhat as will be seen by comparing the examples given on plates 8 and 9. There is no school of art more interesting than the Anglo-Norman, as it is called, of that time. The illuminated border had not yet established itself, but the initials, drawn upon a ground of burnished gold or of diapered tints, enclose painted miniatures looking like very fine pen-and-ink designs carefully colored. Bibles thus decorated are very numerous. As they approach the end of the century, they exhibit now and then long straight lines, ending in curves or fleurons, which spread from the pictured initial upwards and downwards, and form a simple border to more than half the page. This incipient practice increased gradually from the beginning of the following century onwards. The fleurons became gold ivy-leaves, and similar leaves were figured as sprouting out from the long straight border-lines, these lines being extended so as to enclose the page on all sides. Still the effect was stiff and imperfect, but by the close of the fourteenth century, a very splendid kind of foliated border was used by French illuminators. The gold leaves called ivy-leaves were now introduced in greater number and made to sprout, no longer from the straight border frame itself, but more naturally out of branches which festooned from the frame. The ivy-leaf border in this state was very much favored in French illumination, but was little used elsewhere. It generally accompanies pictorial illustration of superior merit, and gives an air of distinction and elegance to any MS. in which it is found. The French schools of Central France and of Paris had by the middle of the fourteenth century regained their lost pre-eminence in art.
The thirteenth century was the first and the finest period of mediseval " gothic," so far as handwriting is concerned. (The name is a misnomer, but has a clear recognized sense, and is useful.) The letters are angulated at their extremities, but the bodies are still rounded and perfectly clear. The square and lapidar Gothic was introduced in the fourteenth century, and prevailed during that and the two succeeding centuries. It was a vicious script, indistinct and difficult to read; and although some examples, distinct, legible, and handsome, were brought out in the fifteenth century, the system was generally bad, and there is no reason to regret its extinction, which took place in France, Italy, and Spain about the middle of the sixteenth century, and in England somewhat later, although it is lingering on even now in Germany and Denmark.
The square Gothic of the fourteenth century, however unclear and objectionable as a script, was not ill adapted to ornamental purposes, as the vast number of prayerbooks for the laity produced between 1350 and 1400, and throughout the succeeding century, make manifest. Of those prayerbooks, which for a hundred and fifty years were the chief medium for displaying the skill of the medieval illuminator, the number of copies which were made for individuals or families, as birth-day or wedding gifts, or for whatever reason, was incredibly large. The existence of such prayer- books, well written and decorated with paintings, for private persons, is enough in itself to show that the office of calligrapher and miniaturist was a secular trade, and that the " old monks," to whom so many persons ascribe the writing of the " missals," had long ceased to be the sole producers of MSS.
Not many of the earlier Books of Hours have survived, that is, of those which were written between 1300 and 1350; but from the latter date onwards to 1400 they are not uncommon, and from 1400 onwards very numerous. This statement refers to French and Franco-Flemish and Burgundian work. Of English work, there are very few extant anterior to 1400, and the same may be said of Dutch examples. As for those written in Italy and Germany, it is only towards the close of the fifteenth century that they are met with. The English and French Hours produced during 1350-1420 are very different in their mode of ornamentation. The Gothic writing was pretty nearly the same everywhere, and the larger illuminated initials had followed one model since the thirteenth century. These initials (when not historiated with little miniatures) were painted in color upon a ground usually of gold. The space within the letter-forms was filled up with a conventional flower-pattern, having buds of red arid blue tints. At the earlier period the letter-form has a small extension upwards and downwards, in a simple style resembling wood-carving. In the fourteenth century this extension is increased, and the long straight border, with ivy-leaves here and there, was produced. While that kind of border was in France being developed into its most elegant phase, a different type was preferred in England. The gold ground of the initial is prolonged into a stem, around which twines a corresponding prolongation of colored foliage springing from the curved extremities of the initial letter. Thus they form a border which would be pretty enough in itself, but which is further decorated with tufts of long feathery grass, tipped with buds, which grow out of the stem and sweep in graceful curves outside the line of foliage. This feathery ornament which, except for the little fleurons in color here and there, seems drawn with a fine pen in brown ink is distinctly English, and was retained till late in the fifteenth century, side by side with newer methods borrowed from France. The red and blue, with white lights, which are used in the initials and capitals by the French illuminators, are in the English MSS. pink and pale blue, and the white lights are broader.
As soon as the ivy-leaf pattern, with its brilliant gold points, began to go out of fashion in France, a new kind of border came into vogue. The conventional red and blue foliage still continued to spring out from the initials and at intervals below and above ; all the intervening space was filled in with curling and twining tendrils, drawn with a pen or a very fine brush, forming a kind of hedge, in the midst of which were scattered here and there little natural flowers and fruits, growing out of the curled tendrils. This was in use in French and Burgundian and Flemish MSS. from about 1420-30 onwards, and became a favorite method of decoration in England towards the middle of the century. At that time, and in that style, prayerbooks done in the three countries are often much alike, and it is only the painting of the miniatures and the differences in the calendar and litany which distinguish them.
Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, You Are Reading Chapter 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters
Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, You Are Reading Chapter 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters
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