Illuminated manuscripts are handwritten books or rolls with painted decoration and illustration. The use of the term "illuminate" to describe the painting of books derives from medieval usage; Dante (1265–1321) refers to "quell'arte Ch'alluminar chiamata è in Parisi" (Purgatorio, 11. 80–1). Sire de Joinville's (c.1224–1137) description of the scribe "qui a fait son livre l'enlumine d'or et d'azur" suggests that the use of the verb may have been stimulated by the fact that the pages appeared literally to be "lit up" by the burnished gold that was so frequently employed in book decoration from the 13th century onwards. Although some have thought the term "illuminated"to be strictly applicable only to those manuscripts where the painting is enhanced by the use of gold or silver, it is now more widely used of any manuscript with decoration more elaborate than simple coloured initials (see manuscript illumination).
Sometime around the 4th century ad the relative advantages of the parchment codex over the papyrus scroll achieved widespread recognition in western Europe and became the predominant form used for the recording and transmission of texts. One consequence of this shift was the provision of a flat, stable, and enduring surface that could carry more elaborate illustration than was possible on the fibrous, absorbent—and, when the scroll was consulted, shifting—surface of papyrus. The increased importance of the written word, especially in association with the rise and spread of Christianity, led to a gradual proliferation in the production of illuminated books that reached a peak in the 14th and 15th centuries. As a class, more manuscripts survive than any other medieval artefact, and the painted images protected within the pages of these books far outnumber the extant works of art in any other medium. The painted embellishment or illustration of texts continued to be a desired component of formally produced books well into the 16th century, and for some decades after the invention of printing with movable type the grandest copies of an edition would be those printed on vellum and furnished with illuminated decoration and illustration, such as the 20 copies from Jensen's edition of the Italian translation of Pliny the elder's Natural History (1476) (e.g. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, ML C52 BN 1985). An exceptional continuation has been the tradition of illuminating individually produced commemorative documents, such as those confirming titles, arms, or the award of degrees, for example the carta executoria de hidalguia produced in such numbers in the 16th–18th centuries for the Spanish nobility.
Inevitably, over the course of the millennium or so that illuminated manuscripts were produced in western Europe both the texts reproduced and illustrated and the means of their production changed; there might even be a wide variation in practice within a single centre according to the markets served or civic regulation. As the principal medium for cultural transmission the manuscripts that were made reflected the interests and concerns of the dominant groups in the societies that produced them.
The copying of texts was already regarded as an essential in the early Church; S. Jerome (c.342–420) included the copying of books among monastic duties, and Cassiodorus (c.485–c.580) founded two monasteries where he encouraged both secular and religious learning, thus establishing the monastic tradition of scholarship responsible for the preservation of so much classical as well as theological writing. The Bible known as the Codex Amiatinus that was made in Northumberland for presentation to the Pope (c.700–16: Florence, Bib. Laurenziana, MS Am. I) has a miniature showing a prophet writing a manuscript while seated in front of a large cupboard containing writing implements and a Bible in nine volumes: it is believed that the illustration, like the text itself, was copied from Cassiodorus' own large, single-volume Bible. Its presence as a frontispiece is an implicit statement of the importance that the recorded and written word had to Christian doctrine. Biblical manuscripts, Gospels and psalters, were the most elaborately illuminated products of insular, Carolingian, Ottonian, and Anglo-Saxon art. Whether they were to serve the purposes of missionaries, monks, or emperors these manuscripts were mostly produced in the scriptoria or cloisters of abbeys and monasteries. Around 1100 this situation began to change because the proliferation of new texts during the Romanesque period and the expansion of demand gave rise to the collaboration of secular scribes and illuminators on monastic production. It seems particularly that the best illuminators were no longer necessarily trained in the monasteries that patronized them. The rise of the universities and the growing desire from the laity for the ownership of books led to an ever-increasing importance for the secular book trade, and there is abundant evidence from the 13th century of the sophisticated organization of the trades of the book in the university cities of Paris and Bologna. The most obvious, and numerous, monuments to the efficiency of the Paris book trade are the 13th-century pocket bibles that were produced in huge numbers, and with a layout and appearance that is still emulated in bibles printed today. From this point on, whether employed at a piecework rate or as a privileged member of a noble household, it was professional, and usually secular, artists who illuminated the ever-broadening range of texts desired by religious and civic institutions and individual members of bourgeois and court society. During the Gothic period the trades associated with producing a manuscript seem often to have been located within a particular district of a city—on the left bank in Paris and around Fleet Street in London—and the co-ordination of their tasks seems often to have been undertaken by a bookseller or stationer. There had clearly always been a market for second-hand manuscripts and during the 15th century it appears that the trade was sufficiently well developed for standard books of hours at least to have been produced speculatively.
With the spread and increase in the production of printed books and their availability to wider ownership, the expectation and requirements of an illustrated book changed; this combined with technical expediency to result in integrated mechanical production of both text and illustration and decoration. Since the middle of the 16th century it has only been in isolated and eccentric cases that the hand-produced illustration of texts has been a focus of artistic attention. The most notable exception to this was the self-conscious resurgence of interest in illuminated manuscripts by members and followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, above all William Morris, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The approach to decorating a page or illustrating a text varied widely; the page may be treated straightforwardly like any more monumental support and simply carry a rectangular painting, but the most inventive artists have recognized and exploited both the freedom of the blank leaf and the restrictions of a page of text. In the Passion cycle in the Très Riches Heures of John, Duke of Berry (c.1416: Chantilly, Mus. Condé) the de Limburgs alter the shape of the miniature from scene to scene, extending the picture-field in an unparalleled fashion in order to highlight the narrative. An equally innovative response was often shown in the more constrained context of the decoration of a page of text, especially by some illuminators in Flanders and the Veneto in the decades around 1500, who seemed to delight in playing illusionistic games as though denying the existence and limits of the parchment surface. They treated the lines of text as if they were written on a screen erected in front of the events and the world that they depicted in the margins beyond. In some instances, when the illustrations predominated and their integration into the text required it, a specific page layout might be devised, as for example for Bibles moralisées, but this was exceptional. More commonly the illumination of a page drew upon a repertoire of illustrative and decorative elements that were variously provided or combined according to the type of text, the prevailing style, and, most importantly, the level of expenditure of the patron.
The most standard elements were the miniatures and historiated initials that contained scenes or figures illustrating or complementing the text; other illuminated initials, borders, and line-endings served a more decorative purpose and—even when they included figures, whether grotesques placed in margins or dragons entwined in initials—not necessarily related to the significance of the text. As well as having an instructive and decorative purpose the illumination had another more mundane and practical role: the different hierarchy of decoration, the varying size or type of initial used to open a book, a chapter, or a verse, made it easy for readers to find their way around a manuscript. Furthermore the images could identify a text for someone whose reading skills were not great: reaching a miniature of the Annunciation to the Virgin in a book of hours, one could be certain that the beginning of the office of the Virgin had been found.
Kay Sutton
Alexander, J. J. G., Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (1992).
Backhouse, J. M., The Illuminated Manuscript (1979).
Hamel, C. de, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (1986).
Pächt, O., Book Illumination in the Middle Ages (1986).
From The Oxford Companion to Western Art
