Lessons in the Art of Illuminating Part 2

Our next Plate is from a ma.n.u.script in the Lambeth Library. Leave to copy it was readily granted to us by the lamented Archbishop Tait. It is No. 459 in the Library Catalogue, and contains no fewer than twenty miniatures, as well as borders like this one. It belongs like Plate IX. (the Frontispiece) to the English flower pattern style of the fifteenth century, and is remarkable for the sober effect of the gorgeous colors employed, and for the delicacy of the scroll-work in black.

A great deal of this effect is due to the application of gold. The illuminators employed both what we call "sh.e.l.l gold" and leaf. They attached the greatest importance to skill in gilding, and the result is that their "raising" survives after centuries, when that executed at the present day often cracks off after a few weeks or months, if not very carefully handled. Many books, containing the secret of making these preparations, and sizes of all kinds, are in existence; and show that while the same end was attained by many different kinds of processes, one ingredient was never omitted, namely, great care and pains, and the gradual gathering of skill through experience.

It is difficult to explain the method of using gold-leaf without an actual demonstration: and the student will learn more in ten minutes by watching a competent gilder than by reading a library of books on the subject. The "raising" is to be obtained from any artist's colorman, and nothing but practice long and a.s.siduous can secure the power to use it. The same rule must be laid down for burnishing, which is an art not to be acquired in a day. It might be well to commence with the dotted work, common in the fourteenth century, and when we have learned to make a burnished dot with our agate point we may go on and burnish a larger surface. The effect of burnished leaf gold cannot be given in chromo-lithography, but it may be worth while to remark that all the gilding in the original illumination from which this Plate is copied is burnished on a raised surface, even the small letters in the text.

The colors employed by the copier were of a more mixed and complicated character than those for the other page from the Lambeth Library. The reason is apparent in a moment on comparing the two. In this page the brilliancy is so tempered as to produce a comparatively subdued effect. In the General Sketch mention has already been made of miniatures in which the artist restricted himself to the use of certain colors, so as to insure a peculiar and delicate effect. Here there has been no such restriction, but each color has been softened and so worked over with patterns and lines in body white or in pale yellow, that there is no glare or contrast. The student should be careful how he obtains harmony by this method, as he may find all his work weakened and paled; but, skilfully used, the system may be made to produce the most charming results.

The blue is Prussian, over which are dots and lines of Chinese White.

The pink is obtained by mixing Lake and Chinese White, shaded with darker Lake, and also heightened with white lines and dots. The orange is pale Indian Yellow shaded with Burnt Sienna, and with an admixture of Lake in the deeper shadows. The green in this example is obtained by mixing Prussian Blue and Indian Yellow in different proportions.

On the back of Plate IV. are two more outlines from Mr. Robert Young's little French Book of Hours. They are admirable models of a kind of work which for fully half a century was to France what the "flower pattern" was to England. The branches are generally dark blue delicately lined with white. The leaves are sometimes gold, that is where there is not already a gold ground, and sometimes yellow, red, and blue. The prevailing tint is blue, and in some pages no other color, besides the gilding, is employed.

Some outline borders and ornaments of the same period and style are to be found on the back of Plates V. and VI. The coloring of some of them will be indicated by a reference to Plates III. and I.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BULL, BADGE OF NEVILLE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--FACSIMILE OF Ma.n.u.sCRIPT IN LAMBETH PALACE LIBRARY, 15TH CENTURY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PAGES FROM A BOOK OF HOURS OF FOURTEENTH CENTURY.]

DESCRIPTION OF PLATE V.

Plate V. shows three ornaments from ma.n.u.scripts of late date, all in the National Collections.

The border with the raspberries is from a Missal of the sixteenth century in the British Museum (Addl. 18,855), and was probably written and illuminated in the Low Countries. We have already mentioned the extraordinary freedom and ease of the Flemish work of that period.

Every beautiful object was made use of for pictorial effect. Children, birds, jewels, sh.e.l.ls, as well as fruit and flowers, are to be found.

They particularly excelled in painting pearls. One border is green, with chains and ropes of pearls strewn all over it. The calendar represents domestic scenes, each strongly surrounded with a double gold line, the written part being simply left out in the middle, so that the scene forms its border. The gold ground presents a slightly different appearance from that shown in our engraving, as it is flat, being painted with sh.e.l.l-gold not put on very thickly. The shadows are of Burnt Umber, which has a very transparent effect on the gold ground.

Beside this border is a fine letter of somewhat earlier date from a chorale book, German work in all probability, which, with many others, Italian and Flemish as well as German, were ruthlessly cut up into fragments, perhaps at the Reformation, perhaps more recently, and are now in the Art Library of the South Kensington Museum. They are much rubbed and faded, and our chromo-lithograph represents this initial C as it appeared when first finished. In much of the northern work of this period--about the middle of the fifteenth century, say 1450--there is a beautiful style of ornamental scroll-work, which some have proposed to call the "Leather Pattern." It may represent the cut leather work of the mantling of a knight's tilting helmet. A small specimen of it is shown in the turned-back petals of the flowers in this letter, but whole volumes are to be seen entirely decorated with it, and some of the best work of the period was accomplished in it.

The third of these ornaments is also from the collection in the South Kensington Museum. In this design the thing to be most noticed is perhaps that which is least prominent, namely, the gold spots, with black filaments, as it were, floating from them. They serve to eke out and fill up the composition, and in some books are used with fine effect on almost every page. They should be thickly gilt on a raised surface, and should have dark outlines, and the filaments rapidly and lightly drawn, either with a pen or with a very fine brush, pruned down almost to a single hair. Many other pretty effects may be obtained by early training the hand and eye to draw single lines in this way. The letters in one of our other Plates (No. I.) are entirely filled with tracery of the kind, and the patterns princ.i.p.ally in use are easily learned. Anything free is preferable to servile imitation and tracing, and these diapers in particular lose more than almost anything else in the whole art of illumination by direct copying. The student should learn to adapt his delicate lines--chiefly in red and blue--to any form of letter, and while drawing them should not let his hand falter or hesitate for a moment. It is the same with the lace-like patterns in white which were so much in vogue for heightening the edges of letters in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They are very necessary to the effect, but must be painted in with a light touch and great rapidity, or they lose all spirit.

The initial P on the previous page, and also the initials in pages vii. and 1, have been taken from MSS. illuminated with the "English flower-pattern." An attempt has been made to represent the colors employed by means of lines. This system was first applied to heraldry in the first half of the seventeenth century. Horizontal lines represent blue; vertical, red; cross hatching, black; dotting, gold or yellow. Green is denoted by lines "in bend dexter," and purple by lines "in bend sinister."

The bands and borders on the back of Plate V. are of the fourteenth century, but similar ornaments were common at all times. They are chiefly red or blue, with patterns in white lines and dots, and in highly burnished gold. They are employed both as borders and to fill up incomplete lines of writing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE V.--ORNAMENTS AND LARGE INITIAL, 15TH AND 16TH CENTURIES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BANDS AND BORDER ORNAMENTS--FOURTEENTH CENTURY.]

DESCRIPTION OF PLATE VI.

A page of writing and five separate initials from a book of "Hours,"

written in Flanders or Holland at the end of the fifteenth century, are here shown, with a border of the same period from another volume.

The first book, which is in a private collection, affords an example of the kind of illumination which is styled by the French "grisaille,"

a word which may be translated "grey-work." In this style, which consists usually in the artist restricting himself to certain colors, or to black, grey, and white only, very few books were ever written. I have already, in the General Sketch, mentioned one which had pictures in imitation of Limoges enamels. A volume apparently illuminated by the same hand as those in our MS. is in the Burgundian Library at Brussels. The figure pictures in both look as if they were not painted by the same artist as the writing and illumination of the letters, and it is probable two or more were employed in the production.

There was great activity in all the arts in the Low Countries during the fifteenth century, and the most gorgeous books ever illuminated were written there at that period. At Dortrecht, at Bruges, and other places there were schools of illuminators, and the practice of the art was not confined, as in England, to ecclesiastics and the cloister.

The books written were, however, mainly religious; and the same designs were used over and over again. It would, in fact, be easy to identify each guild of miniature painters by their employment of the same set of forms. This eventually led to deterioration, and only the introduction of oil painting, by turning the minds of the artists into a wider channel, saved Flemish art. The masters of the Van Eycks, of Memling, of Matsys, of Van Romerswale were undoubtedly the teachers of illumination in books.

The artist in "grisaille" always took especial pains with his draperies. He had so little wherewith to produce his effect that he sometimes almost reached the _chiaro-scuro_ of a later period. Some of the pictures of this school which I have seen look as if they were intended to represent moonlight views. In the present volume the effect of the soberly coloured figure subjects is greatly enhanced by the rich colors of the border, and the brilliantly burnished gilding.

The ground on which the letter O is gilded in Plate VI., is quartered into red and blue, and the outer part "counter-changed," as they say in heraldry. A delicate pattern is worked over the colors in body-white. The small leaves are painted with thick coats of Emerald Green.

The border is from a Book of Hours in the British Museum. The gilding in the original is laid on with sh.e.l.l, worked very flat and very thin, so as rather to impart a yellow tone to the ground than to give it any special l.u.s.tre. There are other borders in the book of a similar character, and some which, on a green or a purple ground, show jewels of various kinds, especially pearls, sometimes strewn irregularly over the ground, sometimes worked up into ornaments, or made to look as if they were mounted in richly designed gold settings. In fact, at that age the artist let nothing escape him that would go to enhance the beauty or brilliancy of his page. In the original this border enclosed a very elaborate miniature. These miniatures are very carefully and delicately painted, but perhaps by a different hand, as they are not equal in refinement to the borders. The Office for the Dead is ornamented with a black border, on which is architectural tracery in gold on which skulls are arranged, one of them with a pansy or heartsease and forget-me-not, beautifully painted, growing out of the hollow eyes. The border of the picture of the Annunciation is made with a tall lily growing from an ornamental vase at the side.

The Dutch and Flemish illuminators at this period excelled in manipulation, and many of the books which they painted have all the merit and almost all the importance of pictures. Anything and everything was used as ornament. In some no two pages are even in what can be called the same style; but delicacy of workmanship, the faces especially being finished as real miniatures, is characteristic of all. It is probable that whole schools of artists worked on a single volume, dividing the labour according to the skill of each artist.

On the back of Plate VI. will be found some further examples of the ornaments, letters, and "line finishings" of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, chiefly from French books. The A and the Z are from the same MS. as Nos. 6 and 7 on Plate III. The KL united form the heading of the Calendar in a book with ivy pattern borders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--PAGE AND INITIALS (LOW COUNTRIES, 15TH CENTURY). BORDER FROM MS. IN BRITISH MUSEUM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRENCH INITIAL LETTERS AND BORDER ORNAMENTS--FOURTEENTH CENTURY.]

DESCRIPTION OF PLATE VII.

Pictorially considered the ill.u.s.trations on Plate VII., it must be admitted, are more quaint than beautiful. All the subjects on this page are, with the exception of the thirteenth and fourteenth century borders (6), (4), more or less heraldic in character. It will be best to take them in the order in which they are numbered.

The lady seated (1) holds in either hand the arms of the Duke of Burgundy, slightly varied as to quarterings. The picture is taken from the famous "Bedford Missal" in the British Museum, which is not a missal at all, but a Book of Hours, illuminated in France for the Duke of Bedford, one of the brothers of Henry V. It therefore belongs to the fifteenth century. The lady is sitting on what in heraldry is called "a mount vert," which in turn is supported by the little half architectural scroll-work below; her dress is purple, shaded with grey, in opaque color; the arms are painted in Prussian Blue and Vermilion, the gold being sh.e.l.l.

The gentleman to the right (2) is Sir Nele Loring, a Knight of the Garter. Some time in the fourteenth century a monk of St. Albans, Thomas Walsingham, compiled a list of the benefactors of the abbey, and as far as possible presented his readers with a portrait of each.

They are rather rough but eminently picturesque. The book is particularly interesting from the curious particulars it gives us as to the expenses of the illuminator. One Alan Strayler, it tells us, "worked much upon this book," and the editor or compiler ran up a debt with him of the comparatively large sum of three shillings and fourpence, equal to at least 3, 10_s._ 0_d._ of our money, for the colors he had used. The book came into the possession of the great Lord Verulam, better known as Lord Chancellor Bacon, and by him it was given to Sir Robert Cotton, who collected the Cottonian MSS. It is known in the British Museum as "Nero D. vii." from its place in the book-case of Sir Robert Cotton which bore the effigy of that Caesar.

Sir Nele, or Nigel, Loring died in 1386, having given the abbey many gifts, and as he was K.G. he is represented in a white robe diapered with "garters."

Our next picture (3) is from a very curious and beautiful, but much injured ma.n.u.script, reckoned the number ii. in the collection at Heralds' College. By the kindness of "Somerset Herald" we are allowed to copy it. The book is a list of banners used probably at a tournament in the reign of Henry VIII. Heraldry became more or less the kind of "science" it still is under the last of the Plantagenet kings, and was kept up in great glory by their successors, the first two Tudors. The banner here given is that of Henry Stafford, who was made Earl of Wiltshire in 1509. It shows the swan, the crest of the Staffords, with a crown round its neck and a chain, and the ground, partly black and partly red, the colors of the family, is powdered with "Stafford knots," their badge. Across, in diagonal lines, is the motto "D'Umble et Loyal." These banners, which might well be imitated in modern illumination, are made up of livery colors, with crests and badges, and are usually accompanied by the coat of arms of the person to whom each belonged.

The last of the heraldic features of the page (5) is also the earliest. It represents part of the border of a Psalter made, it is believed, in honour of the intended marriage of Prince Alphonso, the son of Edward I., with a daughter of the King of Arragon. He died at the age of ten years in 1282; but it is possible that the illuminations refer to the intended marriage of his sister, the princess Eleanor, with Alphonso, the young King of Arragon. In any case the ma.n.u.script certainly belongs to the middle of the thirteenth century. To the right we see a knight in the chain armour of the period with his shield hung over his arm. Small gold crosses, alternating with "lions rampant" on a blue ground, form part of the border, the other part consisting of "lions pa.s.sant" on a red ground.

Two shields bear, one, the arms of the son of King Edward, "England, differenced with a label, azure," and the other, those of Leon. Crests and mottoes had not been invented, and the artist had little scope for his fancy. But it may not be out of place to call attention to the fact that even at this early period heraldry was made use of for ornament, as in this border, and that it answered the purpose admirably.

On the back of Plate VII. is the outline of an illumination of the Adoration of the Magi, from a French MS. of the 16th century. Borders of this type though very rich seldom occur in books ornamented in England. The branch work is in delicate black lines, with leaves and berries in gold or color. The scrolls are generally in blue, turned up with gold, red, or pink; blue being, however, always the predominant color, so as to insure a certain measure of harmony. The effect, however, depended more on the skill with which the branch work in black was disposed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--BORDERS OF THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES, AND HERALDIC DESIGNS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BORDER AND TEXT, WITH ADORATION OF THE THREE KINGS--SIXTEENTH CENTURY.]