Illuminated manuscript
The Codex Gigas in Sweden is an illuminated manuscript so massive that it takes three librarians to lift it. An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document in which the text is dressed with flourishes, such as borders and miniature pictures. Some were smaller than a modern paperback, like the pocket gospel. Others, such as the Atlantic bibles and the choirbooks that choirs sang from, needed more than one person to carry. The Roman Catholic Church often used them for prayers and for liturgical books such as psalters. From the 13th century the practice spread to secular texts, including laws, charters, inventories and deeds. Many thousands survive from the Middle Ages. They are the best preserved examples of medieval painting, and in many places and periods they are the only paintings left at all. How was such a book made entirely by hand? What were its colors made from, and why did gold matter so much? And who paid for these books, and who actually did the work?
In the 2nd century BCE, according to tradition, King Eumenes II of Pergamum introduced a finer writing surface called vellum. Before then, most manuscripts, decorated or plain, were written on parchment. Vellum was made from stretched calf skin, and it gradually became the standard for luxury illuminated books. Modern scholars are often reluctant to draw a hard line between parchment and vellum, because the skins of many different animals were used. A very few illuminated fragments survive on papyrus instead.
The finished pages were normally bound into codices, which is the format of the modern book. The older scroll format was still used now and then, for a variety of reasons.
Paper manuscripts appeared in the Late Middle Ages. An unusually early example is the Missal of Silos, from the 11th century. It was made in Spain, close to the Muslim paper-making centres of Al-Andalus. Text manuscripts on paper grew steadily more common. Even so, the more expensive parchment was mostly kept for illuminated manuscripts until the end of the period.
Very early printed books show how long the old habits lasted. They left blank spaces for red headings called rubrics, for miniature illustrations and for illuminated initials. All of these were added afterward by hand.
The oldest illuminated manuscripts to survive date from between 400 and 600 CE. Only a small number remain, among them the Vergilius Romanus, the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Rossano Gospels. In the first millennium, the most richly decorated books were most likely Gospel Books. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells are examples. The Book of Kells is the best known illuminated manuscript in the English-speaking world, and it is famous for its insular designs. The Romanesque and Gothic periods later brought many large illuminated bibles containing the complete text.
Up to the 12th century, most manuscripts were made in monasteries. They were made either to add to the monastery library or after a commission from a wealthy patron. Larger monasteries had a scriptorium, with separate areas where a monk could work undisturbed by his brethren. Where no scriptorium existed, small rooms were set aside for copying. One description says each scribe had a window of his own opening onto the cloister walk.
Monks often worked as a collective, and that shielded the individual artist from history. Surviving signatures come more often from scribes than from illustrators. Frequently a manuscript carries only the signature of the patron monastery.
By the 14th century, the cloisters had almost completely given way to commercial urban scriptoria, especially in Paris, Rome and the Netherlands. The method of making a book did not change, but leaving the monastery was a radical step. Demand grew so high that monastic libraries began to employ secular scribes and illuminators. These workers often lived close to the monastery. Some dressed as monks whenever they entered, then went home at the end of the day. Many of these illuminators were well known and acclaimed, and a good number of their identities have survived.
By the late 14th century there was a significant industry. Agents took long-distance commissions, noting the buyer's heraldry and the saints of personal interest to him, which went into the calendar of a book of hours. Even religious manuscripts came from such workshops, one example being that of William de Brailes in 13th-century Oxford. By the beginning of the 15th century, secular workshops were producing most of the best work, and monasteries commissioned from them too. By the end of the period, many of the painters were women, especially for the elaborate borders, and perhaps especially in Paris.
The growing genre of luxury secular manuscripts came very largely from commercial workshops in cities such as Paris, Ghent, Bruges and northern Italy.
Books of hours divided a person's day into eight hours of devotion. These small, personal prayer books were made for lay people, and they were richly illuminated with miniatures, decorated initials and floral borders. They were costly, so they were owned by wealthy patrons, often women. Buyers sometimes asked for donor portraits or heraldry. The calendar could be personalized to record the feast days of local or family saints.
Scale in a picture could signal rank. One description imagines a New Testament scene in which Christ is drawn larger than an apostle, and the apostle larger than a bystander. The humble donor, or even the artist, might appear as a tiny figure in the corner.
The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, made for a French prince, is one of the best known and most extravagant examples. Earlier patrons had different aims. In the early period, rulers commissioned manuscripts for their own use or as diplomatic gifts. Old manuscripts kept being given this way even into the Early Modern period. Monasteries made heavily illuminated books mainly for liturgical use, while their libraries held plainer texts.
Philip the Bold probably had the largest personal library of his time, an estimated 600 illuminated manuscripts. A number of his friends and relations had several dozen each.
When production moved from monasteries to the public sector in the High Middle Ages, illuminated books began to reflect secular interests. They included short stories, legends of the saints, tales of chivalry, mythological stories and accounts of criminal, social or miraculous events. Storytellers and itinerant actors freely used some of them to support their plays.
Bestiaries were among the most popular secular texts. They showed real and fictional animals and often dwelt on religious symbolism, since it was widely believed in post-classical Europe that all organisms were manifestations of God. These books served as both devotional guidance and entertainment for the working class.
The arrival of printing rapidly led to the decline of illumination. In the early 16th century illuminated manuscripts were still being made, but in much smaller numbers and mostly for the very wealthy.
In England, a script called Textura was widely used from the 12th to the 16th centuries. A cursive hand called Anglicana emerged around 1260 for business documents. In the Frankish Empire, Charlemagne's vast educational program gave rise to Carolingian minuscule. In the British Isles, the sturdy Roman letters of the early Middle Ages gave way to Uncial and half-Uncial, and distinctive insular majuscule and insular minuscule developed. Stocky, richly textured blackletter first appeared around the 13th century and grew popular in the later Middle Ages.
A finished text went first to a rubricator. This worker added titles, headlines, the initials of chapters and sections, and notes, in red or other colors. Only then, if the book was to be illustrated, did it go to the illuminator. Lettering was applied with an ink-pot and either a sharpened quill feather or a reed pen.
For commercially sold books, the patron and the scribe, or the scribe's agent, discussed the writing at the start. Once the written gatherings went to the illuminator, there was no longer any scope for innovation. The scribe supplied the script first and left blank spaces for decoration. That demanded very careful planning before pen touched parchment. Earlier black-letter pages show what happened without it, with cramped lettering dominated by huge ornamented capitals or illustrations.
Complex designs were probably planned on wax tablets, the sketch pad of the era. The design was then traced or drawn onto the vellum, possibly with the aid of pinpricks or other markings, as in the Lindisfarne Gospels. One list of steps for a single page begins with a silverpoint drawing of the design. Burnished gold dots come next, then modulating colors. Those steps continue while the marginal figures are outlined. A rinceau, a flowing ornamental pattern, is penned in the border. Finally the marginal figures are painted. Many incomplete manuscripts survive from most periods, and they reveal these working methods.
In the early medieval period, the same people, normally monks, usually did both the text and the illumination. By the High Middle Ages the roles were typically separated, apart from routine initials and flourishes.
Most manuscripts, at every period, contained no images at all. In the early Middle Ages, books were either display books with very full illumination or study books with at most a few decorated initials. By the Romanesque period many more had decorated or historiated initials. In the Gothic period most had at least some flourishes, and a much larger share carried images. A Gothic display page might hold a framed miniature, a historiated initial opening a passage, and a border with small drolleries. Often different artists worked on different parts.
The margins offered scribes room to add their own notes, diagrams, translations and even comic flourishes. Surviving marginalia include centaurs, snail and knight combat, warrior women, battles between cats and mice, and parables from the Bible. Foxes, rabbits and monkeys appear in human roles. The drawings of the 13th to 14th centuries often followed recurring themes, patterned on stained-glass windows, stone carvings and wall paintings.
The placement of these images shaped how a text was read. It prompted readers to look beyond the physical book and interpret the words from several perspectives. Some borders even concealed hidden words and messages.
One religious view held that "the diverse colors wherewith the book is illustrated, not unworthily represent the multiple grace of heavenly wisdom." Illuminators learned color combinations and stylistic distinctions through apprenticeship. The few surviving written sources on colors and techniques may therefore not match what these artists actually practiced. Evidence shows that they planned their color choices in advance.
Red came from several sources. Carmine, also called cochineal, was made from carminic acid in the insect Dactylopius coccus, mixed with an aluminum salt. Crimson, also called kermes, was extracted from the insect Kermes vermilio. Lac was a scarlet resinous secretion of several insect species. Mineral reds included red lead, vermilion, which is mercury sulfide found as the mineral cinnabar, and rust. Red was the most common and inexpensive color. It was linked with blood, fire and godly power, and it often colored initials, lettering and borders.
Pink came from brazilwood, a pigment taken from the Asian tree Caesalpinia sappan. Orcein purple was a dye extracted from several species of lichen. Pink was considered fashionable, and it appeared in the clothing of aristocrats and in fine filigree work. It also colored walls, lakes and skies.
Yellow came from plants such as weld, turmeric and saffron, though saffron was used only rarely because of its cost. Minerals supplied ochre and orpiment, which is arsenic trisulfide. Yellow was often blended with other pigments to make earth tones. It was also layered beneath gold paint to give a multilayered gold effect.
Green was relatively rare. Verdigris was made historically by boiling copper plates in vinegar. Malachite was a mineral, and china green was extracted from buckthorn berries. Green was used for landscapes and was tied to the Garden of Eden and to rebirth. A particular shade of verdigris was used almost exclusively in cross imagery. Green earth was laid under other pigments to give skin tones depth.
Blue came from woad, indigo and turnsole, and also from ultramarine and smalt, now known as cobalt blue. Ultramarine, made from lapis lazuli or azurite, was valuable and rare. It was commonly used for the Virgin Mary and for the clothing of important religious figures. Cheaper or poorer blues sometimes colored initials, lettering and borders.
White lead was made by corroding sheets of lead with vinegar and then covering them with decaying matter such as dung. Chalk, or calcium carbonate, was the other white. White marked religious objects and figures. It also served as an underpigment, and combined with blues it made skies and with reds it made skin tones. In the Gothic period, white outlined figures and added layered highlights.
Black came from carbon sources such as lampblack, charcoal, and burnt bones or ivory. Iron gall ink was made in medieval times by boiling iron nails in vinegar and mixing the result with an extract of oak galls. Black inked the text and outlined facial features and gilded details like halos. It was also used to sketch the illumination before color filled it in.
On the strictest definition, a manuscript is not illuminated unless at least one illumination contains metal. That metal is normally gold leaf or shell gold paint, or at least a brushing of gold specks. Shell gold is gold powder bound in gum arabic or egg. From the 12th century, gold leaf was usually polished in a process called burnishing. Silver and tin leaf, or powdered silver, were used for lettering in a similar way to give shine to the page.
In the early centuries of Christianity, Gospel manuscripts were sometimes written entirely in gold. In religious texts, gold lettering exalted the words. The gold ground style, with all or most of the background in gold, was taken from Byzantine mosaics and icons. Scribes of the time considered gold a way of praising God. A patron could also use it to display the vastness of his riches.
Eventually gold became so common that its value as a barometer of status was degraded. The price of gold had fallen so far that it accounted for only a tenth of the cost of production.
Applying gold was a delicate process that only the most skilled illuminators could manage. The first choice was between gold leaf and specks of gold applied with a brush. Gold leaf was hammered thin, which allowed many areas of the text to be outlined in it. One popular method mixed the gold with stag's glue, then "pour it into water and dissolve it with your finger." Once soft and malleable in the water, it was ready for the page.
The work carried two risks. Gold leaf can adhere to any pigment already laid down, ruining the design. Burnishing is also vigorous, and it can smudge any painting already around it.
Islamic manuscripts use essentially the same techniques as Latin European ones and can also be called illuminated. Comparable Far Eastern and Mesoamerican works, by contrast, are described as painted. The Byzantine world produced manuscripts in its own style, which spread to other Orthodox and Eastern Christian areas. It had a characteristic color palette and different ways of preparing pigments and ink. Its vellum had a unique finish that was less suited to long-term preservation than the more textured Western style.
The first known decorated Arabic manuscripts are some Qur'ans from the 9th century. They had no pictures, but their frontispieces and headings were illuminated with decoration. The tradition of illustrated books began with the Graeco-Arabic translation movement and with scientific and technical treatises, often based on Greek knowledge. Examples include the Arabic versions of The Book of Fixed Stars (965 CE), De materia medica and the Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye. The translators were most often Arab Syriac Christians, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Yahya ibn Adi. Local rulers, such as the Artuqids, sponsored their work.
Throughout the 12th century, the Muslim world, especially the Iberian Peninsula, was instrumental in delivering ancient classic works to the growing intellectual circles and universities of Western Europe. Books there were produced in large numbers, and on paper for the first time in Europe. They included full treatises on the sciences, especially astrology and medicine, where illumination had to show profuse and accurate representations alongside the text.
Arabic manuscript art then exploded in the 12th and especially the 13th century. Syriac Gospels in the Vatican Library and the British Library, from those centuries, derive from the Byzantine tradition. Yet in style they have much in common with Islamic manuscripts such as the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī. This points to a shared pictorial tradition in Syria and Iraq since about 1180. Some of the illustrations have been described as "illustration byzantine traitée à la manière arabe," meaning Byzantine illustration treated in the Arab style. The Persian miniature tradition mostly began in whole books rather than single pages. The Great Mongol Shahnameh, probably from the 1330s, is a very early manuscript of one of the most common works for grand illustrated books in Persian courts.
Jewish religious manuscripts were also illustrated, and figures such as Joel ben Simeon became known for their work. Archival records from medieval Iberia confirm that Jews were painters and practitioners of the fine arts. Some Jewish illustrations show humanlike figures with animal heads, called zoocephalic figures, even when the people depicted are clearly historical or mythological. The Birds' Head Haggadah, from Germany around 1300, is a well-known example. The Leipzig Mahzor also uses the zoocephalic method.
Some have theorized this style evades a prohibition on idolatry. The fact that some manuscripts also show human faces casts doubt on that idea, and the reasons are not fully understood. The Ambrosian Bible of 1236, by Jacob ben Samuel and Joseph ben Kalonymus, is one of the earliest Ashkenazic illuminated biblical codices. It shows Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Solomon, David and others, some with faces obscured or animal-headed. It was made for a patron probably from Ulm.
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Common questions
What is an illuminated manuscript?
An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document in which the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. The Roman Catholic Church often used them for prayers and liturgical books such as psalters.
What are the oldest surviving illuminated manuscripts?
The earliest surviving illuminated manuscripts date from between 400 and 600 CE. Examples include the Vergilius Romanus, the Vergilius Vaticanus and the Rossano Gospels.
What materials were illuminated manuscripts written on?
Most were written on parchment, and vellum made from stretched calf skin became the standard for luxury books. Paper appeared in the Late Middle Ages, and a very few fragments survive on papyrus.
Who made illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages?
Until the 12th century most were made by monks in monasteries, often in a scriptorium. By the 14th century commercial urban workshops in Paris, Rome and the Netherlands had largely taken over, and by the late 14th century many painters were women.
Why was gold used in illuminated manuscripts?
Gold exalted religious texts, and scribes saw it as a way of praising God. Patrons also used it to display their wealth, until it grew so cheap that it made up only a tenth of production cost.
What colors and pigments did illuminated manuscripts use?
Illuminators used insect, plant and mineral pigments, including carmine, vermilion, verdigris, woad and ultramarine from lapis lazuli. Ultramarine was valuable and rare, and was commonly used for the Virgin Mary.
What is marginalia in an illuminated manuscript?
Marginalia are drawings and messages placed in and around the borders of a manuscript page. Examples include centaurs, snail and knight combat, battles between cats and mice, and hidden words.
What led to the decline of illuminated manuscripts?
The introduction of printing rapidly led to the decline of illumination. In the early 16th century manuscripts were still produced, but in much smaller numbers and mostly for the very wealthy.
All sources
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