Illuminated Manuscripts in Classical and Mediaeval Times/Chapter 9

During the thirteenth century "the art of illumination as it is called in Paris" flourished under the Saintly King Louis IX. (1215-1270) as much as it did in England under Henry III. Manuscripts of most exquisite beauty and refinement were produced in Paris, in style little different from those of the Anglo-Norman school. One of the most beautiful and historically interesting is a Psalter (Paris, Bibl. Nat.) which is said to have been written for St Louis about 1260. This is a large folio, copiously illustrated with sacred subjects minutely painted on a ground of burnished gold enriched by tooling. Many of the miniatures are framed in a beautiful architectural composition of cusped arches, with delicate open tracery supported by slender columns.

Fig. 22 gives the bare design of one of the historiated initials in this lovely manuscript, the capital B at the beginning of the Psalms. In the upper part is the scene of David watching Bathsheba bathing; and below is a kneeling figure of the king adoring Christ in Majesty. No reproduction can give any notion of the exquisitely delicate painting, or of the splendour of its burnished gold and colours. The historical scenes from the Old Testament have, after the usual fashion of the time, the Hebrew warriors and their enemies represented as mediaeval knights in armour.



It should, however, be observed that in this and many other French and English miniatures of the time the ancient warriors are represented not in the armour of the actual date of the execution of the manuscript, but with the dress and arms of a couple of generations earlier. The monastic artists were not skilled archaeologists, but they wished to suggest that the scene they were painting was one that had happened long ago, and therefore they introduced what was probably the oldest armour they were acquainted with—that of their grandfathers' or great-grandfathers' time. This is an important point, as in many cases a wrong judgment has been formed as to the date of a manuscript from the mistaken supposition that contemporary dress and armour were represented in it.

It is just the same with the thirteenth century art of England. Paintings executed for Henry III. in his Palace at Westminster had representations of knights in the armour of William the Conqueror's time or a little later. In later times, especially in the fifteenth century, this naïve form of archaeology was given up, and the heroes of ancient and sacred history are represented exactly like kings and warriors of the artist's own time.

The historiated Bibles of Paris in the thirteenth century were equal in beauty and very similar in style to those of the Anglo-Norman miniaturists, but they do not appear to have been produced in such immense quantities as they were in the more northern monasteries.

In the fifteenth century the influence of the Church tended to check the study of the Bible on the part of the laity, and very few manuscripts of the Bible were then written. Their place was to some extent taken by the Books of Hours, enormous numbers of which were produced in France and the Netherlands, all through the fifteenth century; see page 141.

French illuminated Manuscripts of the XIVth and XVth centuries. To this class belong a great many of the magnificent manuscripts of the Apocalypse which have been described under the head of Anglo-Norman manuscripts. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the manuscript styles of Normandy and the northern provinces of France.

In the fourteenth century Paris and Saint Denis were important centres for the production of manuscripts of the most highly finished kind. Historiated Bibles, both in Latin and in French, continued to be produced in great number till past the middle of the fourteenth century. Some of these French translations, executed as late as 1370, are what may be called archaistic in style; that is to say, the subjects selected and the method of their treatment and execution continued to be almost the same as that of the historiated Vulgates of France and Normandy at the beginning of the century. The miniatures are very minute in scale, and are often painted on backgrounds of the brilliant chess-board and other diapers in red, blue and gold. Though extremely decorative and beautiful, the miniatures of this class are not quite equal to those of the thirteenth century Bibles, either in vigour of drawing or in delicacy of touch.

On the whole, in the fourteenth century, the French schools of illumination were the finest in the world, and the manuscripts of Northern France were the most sumptuously decorated of all. One specially beautiful style of ornament was introduced early in the century and lasted with little modification for more than a hundred years. This was the method of writing on a wide margined page, and then covering the broad marginal space by delicate flowing scrolls or curves of foliage, leaves and small blossoms of various shapes being used, but more especially one form of triple-pointed leaf which is known commonly as the "ivy" or "thorn-leaf pattern." Brilliant effect is given to these rich borders by forming some of the leaves in burnished gold; and variety is given to the foliage by the introduction of minutely painted birds of many kinds, song-birds, game-birds and others, treated with much graceful realism.



Fig. 28 shows part of a border from a manuscript of this class, a Book of Hours executed for the Duke de Berri; the typical pointed "ivy-leaves" grow from each of the quatrefoils which are introduced to hold the arms and initials of the owner. It comes from the same manuscript as the illumination shown in fig. 25.

These elaborate borders are usually made to grow out of the ornaments of the illuminated initials in the text, and thus a sense of unity is given to the whole page, the decorations of which thus become, not an adjunct, but an essential part of the text.

Fig. 24 shows a miniature from a French manuscript of this magnificent class, the Treasure-Book of the Abbey of Origny in Picardy, executed about 1312 for the Abbess Héloise. It contains fifty-four large miniatures of scenes from the life and martyrdom of Saint Benedicta. The shaded part of the border is of the richest burnished gold, and the whole effect is magnificently decorative.

The scene represented is the murder of the Saint, whose soul is being borne up to Heaven by two Angels, held in the usual conventional loop of drapery.

As an example of this class of illumination we may mention the famous Book of Hours of the Duke of Anjou (Paris, Bibl. Nat.) illuminated about the year 1380. Every page has a rich and delicate border covered with the ivy foliage, and enlivened by exquisitely painted birds, such as the goldfinch, the thrush, the linnet, the jay, the quail, the sparrow-hawk and many others; and at the top of the page, at the beginning of each division of the Horae, is a miniature picture of most perfect grace and beauty, the decorative value of which is enhanced by a background, either of gold diaper, or else of delicate scroll-work in light blue painted over a ground of deep ultramarine.

Enormous prices were frequently paid by wealthy patrons for sumptuously illuminated manuscripts, especially in the fifteenth century for Books of Hours.



The Paris library possesses (Bibl. Nat. Lat. 919) a very magnificent manuscript Horae, which was painted for the Duc de Berri at the beginning of the century by a French miniaturist named Jaquemart de Odin. At the Duke's death this Book of Hours was valued at no less than four thousand livres Tournois, equal in modern value to quite two thousand pounds. It is mentioned thus in the inventory of the Duke's personal property, item, unes tres belles heures tres richement enluminees et hystoriees de la main de Jaquemart de Odin.... Like all books of this class, specially painted for a distinguished person, the arms and badges of the owner are introduced among the foliated ornaments of the borders of many pages; as the inventory states, par les quarrefors des feuilles en plusieurs lieux faictes des armes et devises.

Fig. 25 shows part of a page from this lovely book, with a miniature of the Birth of the Virgin, painted by Jacquemart de Odin, within a beautiful architectural framing of the finest style.

Space will not allow any attempt to describe even in outline the many splendid classes of illuminated manuscripts which were produced by the French artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A few notable points only can be briefly mentioned.

One special beauty of French illumination of this date is due to the exquisite treatment of architectural frames and backgrounds which are used to enshrine the whole picture. The loveliest Gothic forms are introduced, with the most delicate detail of tracery, pinnacles, canopy-work, shafts and arches, all being frequently executed in gold with subtle transparent shading to give an effect of relief. From the technical point of view these manuscripts reach the highest pitch of perfection; the burnished gold is thick and solid in appearance, and is convex in surface so as to catch high lights, and look, not like gold leaf, but like actual plates of the purest and most polished gold. The pigments are of the most brilliant colours, so skilfully prepared and applied that they are able to defy the power of time to change their hue or even dim their splendour.

Fig. 25. Miniature of the birth of the Virgin painted by the illuminator Jacquemart de Odin for the Duc de Berri. The border is of the characteristic French and Franco-Flemish style; see fig. 28 on page 146.

Another noticeable point about the French and Franco-Flemish illumination is the manner in which certain modes of decoration survived with very little alteration for more than a century. Thus we find the blue, red and gold diapers used for backgrounds, and the ivy-leaf pattern and its varieties, which had been fully developed before the middle of the fourteenth century, still surviving in manuscripts of the second half of the fifteenth century, and continuing in use till the growing decadence of taste caused them to be superseded by borders and backgrounds painted in a naturalistic rather than a decorative manner.

The Franco-Flemish manuscripts of the fifteenth century were in some cases remarkable for the amazing amount of laborious illumination and the enormous number of miniatures which they contain. Some of these, which were executed for Royal or Princely patrons and liberal paymasters, engaged the incessant labour of the illuminator for many years. In these cases he was usually paid a regular salary, and so was relieved from the incentive to hasty work which caused so much inferior illumination to be produced in the fifteenth century.

One of the most famous examples of this lavish expenditure of time on one book is the Breviary of the Duke of Bedford, who was Regent of France from 1422 to 1435. This wonderful manuscript, in addition to countless elaborate initials, and borders round every page, contains more than 2500 miniature paintings, all delicately and richly executed in burnished gold and brilliant colours, with backgrounds, in many cases, of the fourteenth century type, with chess-board patterns and other diapers of the most elaborate and sumptuous kind. The figures are of the finest Franco-Flemish style, showing the influence of the Van Eycks, who were then becoming the most skilful painters, technically at least, in the world.

Another no less famous manuscript is the Bedford Missal in the British Museum, which was painted for the Duke of Bedford, and was presented by his wife to Henry VI. of England, when he was crowned King of France in Paris in the year 1430. The Bedford Missal contains no less than fifty-nine large miniatures and about a thousand smaller ones, not counting initials and borders. One point of special interest about this gorgeous manuscript is that the illuminations have evidently been executed by at least three different miniaturists, who represent three different schools, the Parisian-French, the Franco-Flemish and the English.

It is by no means uncommon to find the work of several different illuminators in one manuscript. Naturally, when a wealthy patron ordered a magnificent book, he was not always willing to wait several years for its completion, as must have been necessary when the whole of a sumptuous manuscript was the work of one man.

Again, it was not an uncommon thing for unfinished manuscripts to be sent to Bruges, Ghent and other centres of the illuminator's art from various distant towns and countries, especially from France, Italy and Spain, in order that they might be decorated with borders and miniatures by one of the Flemish miniaturists.

In some cases it was only the miniature subjects which were left blank; so that we have the text with the illuminated borders and initials executed in the style of one country, while the miniatures are of another quite different school.

Moreover, we find from the Guild records of Bruges that a certain number of Italian and Spanish scribes had taken up their residence in Bruges, and become members of the Guild of Saint John and Saint Luke, so that some manuscripts actually written in Flanders have a text which in style is Italian or Spanish.

Various other combinations of style occur not unfrequently. Many English manuscripts, for example, have miniature paintings which are French or Flemish in style, united with bold decorative borders of the most thoroughly English type.

Manuscripts in Grisaille. In addition to the illuminations glowing with gold and colour of jewel-like brilliance, a peculiar class of miniature painting came into use in France during the fourteenth century and to some extent lasted till the close of the fifteenth. This was a system of almost monochromatic painting in delicate bluish grey tints with high lights touched in with white or fluid gold; this is called painting in grisaille or camaieu-gris ; it frequently suggests the appearance of an onyx cameo or other delicate relief.

The earliest examples of grisaille, dating from the first half of the fourteenth century, sometimes have grounds of the brilliant gold, red and blue diapers, the figures themselves being painted in grisaille; but in its fully developed form no accessories of colour are used, and no burnished gold is introduced, only the mat, glossless fluid gold being used in some cases for the high lights.

Some of the miniatures of this class are extremely beautiful for the delicacy of their modelling and the great refinement of the design, and are evidently the work of artists of the highest class. This system of illumination, being unaided by the splendours of shining gold and bright colours, requires a rather special delicacy of treatment, and was of course quite unsuited for the cheap and gaudy manuscripts which were mere commercial products. In some cases the grisaille pictures are clearly the work of a different hand from the rest of the book, and thus we sometimes see them combined with richly illuminated initials and ivy-leaf borders of the usual gorgeously coloured type.

In some late manuscripts the grisaille miniatures are distinctly intended to imitate actual bas-reliefs, and are painted with deceptive effects of roundness. This led to the introduction into manuscript ornaments of imitations of classical reliefs of gilt bronze or veined marbles, such as occur so often in the very sculpturesque paintings of the great Paduan, Andrea Mantegna.

Till the early part of the fourteenth century the art of the illuminator had been mostly devoted to books on sacred subjects, but at this time manuscripts of Chronicles, accounts of travel, Romances and other secular works, often in the vulgar tongue, were largely written and illuminated in the most sumptuous way, especially for the royal personages of France and Burgundy.

Philip the Bold of Burgundy, who died in 1404, was an enthusiastic patron of literature and of the miniaturists art; as was also Charles V. of France (1337-1380). A typical example of this school of manuscripts is a magnificent folio, formerly in the Perkins collection, of Les cent Histoires de Troye, a composition in prose and verse written by Christina of Pisa about 1390. This magnificent volume contains one hundred and fifteen delicately executed miniatures, the first of which represents Christina presenting her book to Philip of Burgundy.

These miniatures and others of the same class are very interesting for their accurate representations of contemporary life and customs. The costumes, the internal fittings and furniture of rooms, views in the streets and in the country, feasts, tournaments, the king amidst his courtiers, scenes in the Court of Justice, and countless other subjects are represented with much minuteness of detail and great realistic truth. We have in fact in the miniatures of this class of manuscripts the first beginning of an early school of genre painting, which in its poetic feeling and sense of real beauty ranks far higher than the ignoble realism of the later Dutch painters.

One rather abnormal class of manuscript, which belongs both to this period and the following (the fifteenth) century, consists of French or Latin Chronicles of the World beginning with the Creation and reaching down to recent times, written and illuminated with numerous miniature paintings on great rolls of parchment, often measuring from fifty to sixty feet in length. These are usually rather coarse in execution.

Sir John Froissart's Chronicles, and their continuation from the year 1400 by Enguerrand de Monstrelet, were favourite manuscripts for sumptuous illumination among the courtier class both of France and England.

Among the many illuminated books of travel which were produced during the latter part of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries one noble example in the Paris library may be selected as a typical example. This is a large folio manuscript entitled Les Merveilles du Monde, containing accounts in French of the travels of Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo and others. This manuscript was written about the year 1412 for the Duke of Burgundy and was given by him to his uncle the Duc de Berri. Its numerous miniatures are very delicate and graceful, of elaborate pictorial style, with views of landscapes and carefully painted buildings, street scenes and other realistic backgrounds to the figure subjects, all executed with great patience and much artistic feeling. The richly illuminated borders to the text are filled with elaborate foliage, in which real and conventional forms are mingled with fine decorative results.

In the fourteenth century the growing love for national poetry and the more widely spread ability to read and write, which in previous centuries had been mostly confined to ecclesiastics, led to the production of a large number of illuminated manuscripts of works such as the Quest of the Holy Grail, including the whole series of the Chansons de Geste with the Lancelot and Arturian romances, the Roman de la Rose, one of the most popular productions of the fourteenth century, and a whole class of Fabliaux or short stories in verse dealing with subjects of chivalrous and romantic character.

Romances based on ancient history and mythology, such as Les cent Histoires de Troye written by Christina of Pisa about 1390-1395, became very popular among the knightly courtiers of the Rulers of France and Burgundy.

In manuscripts of this class the miniature illuminations play a very important part, and give great scope to the fancy and skill of the illuminator.

In southern France the style of manuscript illumination differed a good deal from that of the northern provinces. During the fourteenth century there was a considerable strain of Italian influence, partly due to the establishment of the Papal Court at Avignon, and the introduction there of Simone Martini or Memmi, and other painters from Florence and Siena, to decorate the walls of the Pope's Palace.

On the whole, however, manuscripts were not produced in such abundance or with such skill in southern France as they were in the north. Paris, Burgundy and the French districts of Flanders were the chief homes of the illuminator's art.

By this time the production of illuminated manuscripts ceased to be almost wholly in the hands of monastic scribes, as it had been in earlier days when manuscripts dealing with profane subjects were scarcely known.

In Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Arras and other French and Flemish cities, large classes of secular writers and illuminators of manuscripts grew up, and special guilds of illuminators were formed, exactly like the guilds of other arts and crafts.

Before long this great extension of the art of illumination, and the fact that it became a trade, a method of earning a livelihood, like any other craft, led to a serious decadence in the art. Though wealthy patrons were able to pay large prices for richly illuminated manuscripts, thus keeping up the production of very elaborate and artistically valuable works of miniature art, yet the practical result was a growing decadence of style and workmanship.

No illuminator working mainly for a money reward could possibly rival the marvellous productions of the earlier monastic scribes, who, labouring for the glory of God, and the credit to be won for themselves and for their monasteries, could devote years of patient toil to the illumination of one book, free from all sense of hurry, and finding in their work the chief joy and relaxation of their lives.

In most even of the best productions of the guild-scribes of the fifteenth century one sees occasional signs of weariness and haste; and in the cheap manuscripts, which were turned out by the thousand in France and Flanders during the latter part of the fifteenth century, there is a coarseness of touch and a mechanical monotony of style, which remind one of the artistic results of the triumphant commercialism of the nineteenth century.

It is more especially in the cheap Books of Hours of the second half of the fifteenth century that the lowest artistic level is reached in France, Flanders and Holland. Education had gradually been extended among various classes of laymen, and by the middle of the fifteenth century it appears to have been usual not only for all men above the rank of artisans to be able to read, but even women of the wealthy bourgeois class could make use of prayer-books. Hence arose a great demand for pictured Books of Hours, which appear to have been produced in enormous quantities by the trade-scribes of towns such as Bruges, Paris and many others. These common manuscript Horae are monotonous in form and detail; they nearly always have the same set of miniatures, which are often coarse in detail and harsh in colour; and the illuminated borders, with which they are lavishly though cheaply decorated, have the same forms of foliage and fruit repeated again and again in dozens of manuscripts, which all look as if they had come out of the same workshop.



It must not however be supposed that all the later French manuscripts, even of the latter half of the fifteenth century, were of this inferior class. Though the best figure painting was far inferior to the glorious miniatures in the Apocalypses of the fourteenth century, yet in their own way, as pictorial rather than decorative illustrations, the French miniatures of this date are often very remarkable for their beauty, their refinement and their interesting and very elaborate details.

Some very fine manuscript illuminations of the highly pictorial type were executed for King René of Anjou, who died in 1480. Fig. 26 shows a good example of this, with a carefully painted landscape background, one of sixteen fine miniatures in a manuscript of the Roman de la très douce Mercy du Cueur damour épris, one of the poetical and allegorical romances which were then so popular in France. This miniature represents the meeting of the Knight Humble Requeste with the Squire Vif Désir. This manuscript is now at Vienna, in the Imperial library, No. 2597.

The illuminated borders are also not unfrequently of very great merit and high decorative value; they are formed of rich and fanciful combinations of various plants and flowers, treated at first with just the due amount of conventionalism, but tending, towards the end of the fifteenth century, to an excessive and too pictorial realism. As late as the middle of the fifteenth century the "ivy pattern" of the previous century survived with little modification, and very beautiful borders occur with branches of the vine, the oak, the maple and other trees, together with a great variety of flowers, such as the rose, the daisy, the columbine, the clove-pink or carnation, the pansy, the lily, the iris or blue flag, the cornflower, the anemone, the violet, the thistle; and with many kinds of fruit, especially the grape, the strawberry, the pomegranate and the mulberry. Among this wealth of fruit and foliage, variety is given by the introduction of birds, insects, animals, and grotesque monsters half beast and half human, or else living figures growing out of flower blossoms, all designed with much graceful fancy and decorative beauty.

Towards the close of the fifteenth century one skilfully treated but less meritorious style of illuminated border became very common in France and Flanders. This consisted of isolated objects, such as sprigs of various kinds of flowers and fruits, especially strawberries, together with butterflies and other insects, shells, reptiles and the like scattered over the margin of the page, very frequently on a background of dull fluid gold. A deceptive effect of relief is commonly attempted by the painting of strong shadows, as if each object were lying on the gold ground and casting its shadow on the flat surface. This attempt at relief of course marks a great decadence of taste, and yet it occurs in manuscripts which show much artistic feeling and great technical skill; as, for example, in the magnificent Grimani Breviary, mentioned below at p. 167, see fig. 38.

In French and Flemish miniatures of this period, gold, applied with a brush, is often used to touch in the high lights, not only in the grisaille miniatures, but also in paintings with brilliant pigments, much in the same way as in the Umbrian and Florentine pictures of contemporary date.

Many manuscripts of the early part of the sixteenth century have elaborate architectural borders, consisting of tiers of canopied niches containing statuettes, all executed in fluid, mat gold.

The use of a very harsh emerald green is characteristic of this period of decadence in France and in Flanders; and generally there is a want of harmony of colour in the miniatures of this time, in which gaudiness rather than real splendour gradually becomes the main characteristic.

At the end of the fifteenth century the influence of the classical Renaissance of art in Italy began to affect the French manuscript illuminations, and especially those by Parisian miniaturists. The introduction of architectural forms of Italian classic style into the backgrounds of miniatures was the first sign of this, examples of which occur as early as the year 1475 or 1480. Fig. 27 shows a characteristic example of a French miniature executed under Italian influence. This is a scene of the marriage of the B. V. Mary to the elderly Joseph, who holds in his hand the dry rod which had blossomed. One of the unsuccessful suitors is breaking his rod across his knee, as in Raphael's early Sposalizio in the Brera gallery at Milan.



The painting represented in Fig. 27 is from a manuscript Book of Hours illuminated by the famous miniaturist Jehan Foucquet of Tours, whose services were secured by Louis XI. from 1470 to 1475. This manuscript Horae, which has been horribly mutilated, the miniatures being cut out of the text, was originally executed for Maître Etienne Chevalier. Foucquet and other French illuminators of his time were largely influenced not only by Italian art, but also by the Flemish school of miniaturists who were followers of Memlinc and Rogier van der Weyden; but by the end of the fifteenth century the Italian influence reigned supreme and soon destroyed all remaining traces of the older mediaeval or Gothic style.

Fig. 28 shows part of a border from the same MS. that is illustrated in Fig. 25 on page 134.