second half. There was not much to choose in the writing of the time in any
country, but it was best in Italy. It was in the dainty adornment of their
illuminated MSS., and in the fine and delicate beauty of the pictorial
designs, that the French school now assumed its place of pre-eminence. The
Apocalypse was a favourite book in the first half of this century, as it
had been in the twelfth, and artists delighted in drawing pictures of its
strange visions. These pictures were seldom quite original in design, since
the earliest delineations had acquired a sort of traditional authority, but
they were sufficiently variant in {74}particulars to exhibit the strength
of the artist. Diapered and chequered patterns came more prominently into
fashion along with the older use of burnished gold, for backgrounds; and a
great deal of excellent work was done. An example from a French Apocalypse
is given on plate 13. In most cases, the picture was drawn with a fine
brush and the colours delicately washed in afterwards. French artists
attained to singular perfection in this dainty method of illustration, and
nothing of the kind excels some of the superior specimens. Amongst them
will be found a number of charming Books of Hours executed at Bourges,
Tours, and Paris, for Charles V of France and his brothers. Whatever may be
thought of the beautiful paintings in Flemish and Italian MSS. at the end
of the fifteenth century, it is undeniable that the last thirty years of
the fourteenth produced French work which will hold its own against the
illumination of any period or of any country. It is curious as showing how
little the warfare against Edward III had affected the progress of art in
France.
_The Fifteenth Century_
The second half of the fourteenth century saw a dynasty of French princes
established in the Duchy of Burgundy, and the union of the states which had
belonged to the Counts of Flanders, to the Duke's dominions. These
political circumstances had the effect of diverting some of the best French
miniaturists to the court of Philippe le Hardi, and of founding a grand
Burgundian school of art, which led to the creation of the Flemish one. The
Burgundian MSS. of the first half of the fifteenth century were usually
executed at Dijon (the capital of the Duchy) or Besancon; and were thus
simply works of French art, not very different in style from those produced
at Bourges, Nevers, and Auxerre; but a certain local type was developed in
the ornamental borders of the miniatures; and as soon as the political
centre of gravity {75}was shifted northwards, by reason of the greater
wealth and importance of the Low Countries, Bruges and Brussels became the
chief towns in Philip the Good's dominions, and a new element was
introduced into Burgundian art. The Flemish artists of Bruges, Lille, and
Liege had been renowned since the middle of the fourteenth century for
their skill in miniature painting, and Van Eyck himself was a dependent of
Philippe le Bon, in whose service he spent the last nine years of his life
at Bruges (1432-1440). It is supposed that the earlier Flemish artists were
the creators of grisaille painting, although that beautiful mode of
pictorial illustration is first found in French books of the middle of the
fourteenth century. (A specimen is given on plate 14.) The finest examples
of grisaille were produced by Flemish artists at Bruges between 1440 and
1470, and a book of Hours, illuminated for Jaquot de Brégilles in 1443, in
the possession of the writer, is one of remarkable beauty. Another fine
specimen, of somewhat later date, is the Miroir Historial, a miniature from
which is reproduced on plate 17. Side by side with this kind of chaste
work, splendid illumination of the rich French style was practised in
Flanders, and a favourable example is given of a Book of Hours painted at
Tournay about 1460, on plate 16.
Grisaille painting originated evidently from the suggestions of carved
stone-work in cathedral-decoration. The figures of saints occupying niches,
which were familiar to the visitants of churches, were the first models
that led to the painting of miniatures with the figures in grey tints. It
must have been, for a true artist, delightful to triumph over the
difficulty of achieving the effects of relief and of modelling with the aid
of a single pigment only. To be the master of such an art, and to handle
the monochrome in such a way as to run with perfect touch through a gamut
of gradations in tone, would surely have been more gratifying than to win
success by the splendour of full illumination. The artist did not, however,
entirely abstain {76}from the use of gold; he allowed it to shine on the
crowns of kings and around the heads of his saints; and colour was used
sparingly in the backgrounds. These backgrounds in the pictures of earlier
date were ornamental diapered surfaces, but after the first decade or two
of the fifteenth century, landscape backgrounds made their appearance. It
was, however, some time before the miniaturist succeeded in realising
effects of distance, and thus producing true pictures as distinguished from
ornamental historiation. The Italians were the first to gain a tolerable
knowledge of perspective, but the Flemings were not much behind them. It
was not, however, till late in the fifteenth century that anything like a
faithful expression of perspective is found in the miniatures of MSS.
In the latter part of the fifteenth century, pure grisaille was extended
into camaieu; that is, the monochrome might be any other colour than grey,
so long as it was used in the same manner. This, however, was usually
confined to parts of miniatures, and not inconsistent with a lavish use of
gold for the lights, and masses of different colour in other portions of
the same picture. The quantity of gold that gave magnificence to the work
of the miniaturist in Flanders and France in the last quarter of the
fifteenth century became excessive. It was a relief to the eye when this
blaze of gold receded before the outcome of late Flemish art. Scarcely any
school produced work comparable for delicacy and truth to the miniatures
painted in prayerbooks at Bruges and Ghent between 1490 and 1520.
_Illuminated Borders in the Fifteenth Century_
After the year 1400, as has been already said, the private Prayerbooks, or
Books of Hours, which at that time were used in France and England, but not
to any great extent elsewhere, began to increase in numbers and develop new
styles of ornament. The pages with illuminated {77}initials still preserved
the older border, the basis of which was a double line of gold and colour
issuing from the initial and running squarely round the page. At the
corners and at intervals gold branches, bearing gold and coloured
ivy-leaves, went forth in somewhat stiff curves to form the outer
decoration of the border. This was in French MSS. In the English ones,
heavy masses of gold and colour representing conventional foliage appeared
at the corners, and out of the border-lines emerged the long sweeping tufts
of feathery grass with red and blue buds, which have been already alluded
to. Towards 1430 the ivy-leaves lost their prominence in France, and were
only preserved in portion of the ornament. The straight framing lines were
abandoned both in England and France, and a broader border was obtained by
a methodical arrangement of hundreds of curling hair-lines, black or brown,
out of which sprung little red and blue flowers of natural appearance. This
pattern was drawn and massed so as to represent a broad frame, even and
square, enclosing the page. This became a customary mode of ornamentation
in both countries, so that a large proportion of English and French work
was much alike in style, though not always in execution. When the middle of
the century arrived, a modification began to take place in French MSS.; the
fine black hair-lines of the borders gave place to wreathing green
branches, less numerous, and thus more proportionate in quantity. The
flowers and leaves springing from them became more numerous, more natural
and less conventional. By this time Burgundian and Flemish Livres d'Heures
were also produced in large numbers, and brilliant pictures of blossoms
growing in the rich gardens of Burgundy added the weight of their influence
to the tendency towards floral decoration. The flowers in the borders grew
more realistic and varied, and were sometimes fine large examples of their
species. This method was followed in England as well as in France. Next
appeared {78}in continental work backgrounds, either of gold or of colour,
to the borders; which had previously been painted on the plain vellum.
Finally, in France it became fashionable to break the border into spaces
(taking various shapes), of which some had gold grounds and some were
without grounds; or to treat the border in such a fashion that the branches
and flowers should appear partly on gold, partly on russet, partly on blue,
or in other combinations. This bizarre fashion did not take the taste
either of English or of Flemish artists. The English retained their crowded
border of flowers and branches painted on the plain vellum, while the
Flemings began to paint rich natural cut flowers upon a monochromatic
ground of pale gold or yellow. On this pale ground, free from all the
convolution of twining branches seen in French and English work, they were
enabled to throw shadows beneath the cut flowers, so that these appeared to
stand out in strong relief, with excellent effect. The new fashion at once
found copyists everywhere; the celebrated Hours of Anne of Brittany is one
of the finer French examples. The imitations done in England were not very
successful.
_End of the Fifteenth Century_
We now reach the last decade of the fifteenth century; in which the late
Flemish school already alluded to arose in Bruges and Ghent. In combination
with those beautiful borders of fresh cut flowers painted in apparent
relief upon pale gold or yellow, the delicate art of Memling and Gerard
David produced small and exquisite miniatures with architectural and
landscape accessories; the like of which had not yet been seen in the
illustration of books, unless we find a parallel in the lovely and no less
exquisite pictures in Florentine manuscripts of the same period. The
radical difference between the work of the north and that of the
{79}south--notwithstanding that each of them betrays to some extent the
influence of the other--is, that the Fleming took his types from real life,
the Florentine from his conceptions of angelic existence.
All the rest of Europe was behind the two favoured countries in which
pictorial and decorative art now reached their culminating point.
Sentimental writers have been, from time immemorial, in the habit of
scouting at wealth and of pouring enthusiastic praise upon penury, as
though the two conditions were equivalent to vice and virtue in morals, to
dulness and genius in intellect. It is quite true that an impoverished
state of society produces better poetry than a rich one; but it is equally
true that the finest artistic work is born amid luxurious surroundings. It
was the wealth of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels which attracted
talent to a warmer air in which it could grow and flourish, on the border
land between the Celt and the Teuton, with all the advantages derivable
from either side. In the same way the riches and luxury of Venice,
Florence, Rome, Naples, Verona, Cremona, Padua, stimulated the faculties of
men who had inherited the traditions of Græco-Roman art. It was a brilliant
autumn in the annals of illumination, but a short one, by reason of the
changes which the new art of Printing had brought about in all things.
Dürer visited Bruges and Venice; he admired the work of Gerard David and of
the Italian miniaturists, but he did not seek to imitate or to rival their
efforts. He belonged to the modern world, and he gave to the art of
engraving what he would, twenty years earlier, have given to the art of
illumination. We have nothing to do here with his profession as a painter
of canvases in which he followed the same tendency as had during the
fifteenth century so wonderfully multiplied the number of Giotto's
descendants in Italy. We may imagine, if we choose, what wonderful
illuminators of manuscripts were lost in Schongauer, Dürer, and Lucas van
Leyden, three men who owed {80}their artistic existence and taste to the
atmosphere of rich cities. From the year 1450 the career of Calligrapher
and Illuminator had been doomed to extinction. Its members gradually
retired from an unequal strife with the clever mechanics from Mentz; some
became printers, some became engravers, and others joined the ranks of the
canvas-painters. Those who remained true to their early training achieved
the most brilliant triumphs of their profession before it was extinguished.
This is the reason why we look to the Flanders, and to the Italy of
1480-1520, for the most absolutely perfect work that was ever produced in
the illumination of manuscripts. Considering that it flourished side by
side with the paintings of the Bellinis and of Andrea Mantegna, and that it
was in touch with the times of Lionardo, of Raphael, of Michel Angiolo, of
Titian, and of Paolo Veronese, we cannot wonder either at its marvellous
beauty or at its sudden withering.
Of the late Flemish school, certain work done for the Austrian Archduchess
Margaret (resident in Bruges with her brother Philip, as children of
Maximilian who had become sovereign of the Low Countries in right of his
wife Mary of Burgundy), of which the famous Grimani Breviary is only one
amongst some ten or twelve examples--was the finest of its kind. The
present writer has possessed one of them--a little volume internally
justifying the tradition that it was illuminated by Gerard David for the
Archduchess
( . . Margot la gente demoiselle
Qu' eut deux maris et si mourut pucelle
as she once suggested for her own epitaph when in danger from a storm at
sea) for presentation to her sister-in-law Juana, the heiress of Castile
(Juana la Loca, the Crazy Jane who has become a personage in nursery lore).
As for the Italian school, it was of wider extent. The illuminators found
generous patrons at Milan, at Venice, at Padua, at Cremona, at Verona, at
Florence, at Bologna, at Rome, and at Naples. In the last city, the Kings
of {81}Aragonese origin were noble employers of talent, and found their
chief rivals in the Medicis, and in Mathias Corvinus, the King of Hungary,
who divided with them the patronage of the best Italian miniaturists. They
also helped to stamp on Spanish work the Italian impress which
characterises it in the last half of the fifteenth century, and thereby to
continue the line which in contact with Naples on the one hand, with Bruges
on the other, formed at the end of the century a ring, uniting Flanders and
Italy as its chief jewels.
The name of Attavante, so famous as a Florentine miniaturist, reminds me of
a Petrarch manuscript which I have seen sold in Paris as illustrated by
him. One of the illuminations contained a bust of a Roman warrior, in the
style so frequently seen in Italian work of about the year 1500, and under
it were the initials M.A., intended evidently for Marcus Aurelius or Marcus
Antonius. Out of them, the cataloguers of two different collections of
great repute, had evolved the idea that they stood for "Maestro
Attavante"--an absurd notion for which there was absolutely no excuse
whatever. Other famous Italian miniaturists were Girolamo dai Libri of
Verona, and Sigismondo da Carpio. I have had examples of the art of both.
One still more celebrated was Giulio Clovio, but he belonged entirely to
the sixteenth century and to the late Renaissance, and his work is in
nowise that of the Middle Ages. It is over-florid and reveals the
theatrical splendour which always accompanies decline. I have possessed one
of his finest examples, which was formerly in the Towneley library.
During the last twenty years of the fifteenth century, a favourite style of
border among the Italians was an imitation of goldsmith's work. Gems of
various colours set in gold, with cameos or medallions of classic busts,
were the chief feature, but spaces were always left in which the
miniaturist could paint his tiny exquisite figures of the fight between
David and Goliath, or something of the kind. Venetian {82}examples of such
miniatures are remarkably beautiful--the beauty mingled with a certain
gravity of manner; those which are of Roman origin have an air of masterly
splendour; but those which were produced at Florence between 1480 and 1510
are so lovely as to upset our critical judgment in comparing them with work
done at Bruges. In the border-illustration there never was any resemblance
between the work of Italy and that of other countries, and there can be no
hesitation in deciding between them in favour of Italy as more
appropriately decorative.
I possess a Psalter written and illuminated for Pietro dei Medici,
apparently about 1490, in which the first two pages are stained light
green, so as to soften and make delicate the numerous tints found in the
painting and border upon one of them. These are the work probably of
Attavante, and can hardly be excelled for the exquisite taste and finish
both of the miniature and of the ornamentation. I have also had a charming
little Prayerbook written for Lorenzo the Magnificent, which was evidently
from the same hand; and a Siennese Psalter of kindred type and of the same
period. The loveliness of these Tuscan examples takes away all possibility
of critical fault-finding. They delight the eye with a fuller satisfaction
than even the best of the Flemish illuminations. The latter we examine
carefully, with a continual increase of admiration; while we enjoy the
harmonious beauty of the Florentine, we feel that the critic's functions
are set aside.
The writing of the late Italian MSS., among which classical texts rival the
books of prayers in the elegance of their adornment, was more frequently
Roman than gothic, but a fine black-letter hand survived into the sixteenth
century, especially at Venice. The initials decorated with interlacements,
in a style that evinced its Irish origin, which are found in Italian
manuscripts after 1350 were retained till near the end of the fifteenth
century in Venice and Naples, but they had fallen out of use in Tuscany
{83}somewhat earlier, being hardly appropriate to the rich neo-classical
style of Florentine border-decoration.
As for the Italian styles of writing after the twelfth century, they were
various. The Carolingian in a bold and handsome type lasted longer in Italy
than elsewhere; but both it and the Lombard were passing away about the
year 1200. The thirteenth century saw the evolution of the gothic letter
out of the Carolingian, in Italy as well as over the rest of Europe, but in
Italy it was accompanied by a sort of Carolingian cursive, slightly sloped,
which finally developed the two forms now familiar over all the
world--Roman and Italic. In the fourteenth century a beautiful square
gothic letter was in use in Italy, and remained unaltered in form till the
end of the fifteenth; but it was not unaccompanied by various other styles
of writing. The Italic was still in its primitive stage without elegance,
and some books were written in a gothic letter derived from French and
German models, and quite unlike the square Italian gothic. The script of
the book, from which a facsimile is given on plate 12, is an example of
this outlandishness. Before the fifteenth century arrived the cursive hand
had split into its two branches. The more elaborately written letters were
upright, and tended to restore the Carolingian original; the less elaborate
characters began to slope still further, and by degrees became a separate
script, which then became cultivated. The writing of Petrarch (who died in
1374) was chosen as the model for the first Italic types used in printing
(1501); and the upright round hand used by numerous Florentine and Venetian
calligraphers towards the middle of the fifteenth century was chosen as the
model of the first Roman types, cut by Sweynheym and Pannartz in the
Benedictine monastery of Subbiaco, not far from Rome, in the year 1464.
_Remarks on the subjects reproduced in the plates_
The first plate represents portion of a hieroglyphical {84}text written on
a roll of papyrus which was wrapped up with the mummy of the man whose
virtues are recorded on it. As for the exact age and contents of the roll,
it is beyond my capacity to say anything definite; but there is a delicacy
in the drawing of the figures and in the formation of the letters which
seem to indicate a considerable age, probably not less than twelve hundred
years B.C. Each column of the writing has to be read from top to bottom,
beginning with the first column on the left. It has been said in an earlier
page that the hieratic and demotic scripts differed from the hieroglyphic
in being written like Hebrew in long horizontal lines from right to left.
The difference is, however, merely formal. If we turn the hieroglyphic page
half round, so that the right side becomes the bottom, and the left side
the top of the page, we can see the inscription run in hieratic fashion
from right to left.
Plate 2 is perhaps more difficult to decipher than Plate 1. We know,
however, that the demotic script was used only amongst laymen in matters of
business and of money; and this no doubt represents some commercial
transaction that took place between 500 and 200 B.C. The demotic was a
complex cursive evolved from the hieratic; its invention, or at least its
use to any considerable degree, does not appear to have been much
antecedent to 600 B.C., and there was little necessity for its continuance
after the second century B.C.
It was probably about the beginning of the Christian era that the demotic
finally disappeared before the Coptic, an alphabet derived from the Greek,
of which Plate 3 gives an example. The Arabic heading which accompanies the
Coptic rubric above the Psalm that begins below (the 118th [Greek: riê]),
is in a hand of the latter part of the fifteenth century. Notwithstanding
the lateness of the specimen, the script takes its proper place here as
representing a script of the first century.
Plate 4 is taken from a copy, written on vellum at {85}Nablús, of the
Samaritan Pentateuch. Both in language and in letters it represents the old
Hebrew of the days of Solomon, long anterior to the time when Ezra
introduced from Chaldæa the square characters now called Hebrew; the
ancient letters having been preserved by a small remnant in North
Palestine. The writing resembles that of the Phoenicians, and the example
given on plate 4, notwithstanding its lateness, does not exhibit a very
much modified form of the character.
Plate 5 is from an Abyssinian MS. of the sixteenth century, on the Life of
the Virgin. The real origin of the artistic decoration is unmistakable. It
is what we call Byzantine, but ought rather to be called Ægypto-Grecian.
The people of Abyssinia, who were mainly Southern Arabs or Sabæans,
received their instruction in art along with their Christianity a few
centuries after the beginning of the era, and they have never abandoned
them. As for the writing which appears on the plate, it is in the old Geez
or Ethiopic language, and descended from that of the Sabæan people whose
monumental inscriptions in Himyaritic language and characters are now
attracting considerable interest.