Mr. Owen Jones, an English architect, and the author of a very
beautiful work on the Alhambra, has been enabled, by the curious
process of chromo-lithography, originally discovered by the Bavarian,
Alois Sennefelder, to popularize and multiply almost indefinitely
the delicate and highly-finished illuminations executed by the pious
monkish artists of the middle ages.
According to Felton, the manuscript illuminators "borrowed their title
from the illumination which a bright genius giveth to his work," and
they form the connecting link in the chain which unites the ancient
with the modern schools of painting. Their works, considered as a
subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and
barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they
lived, whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the
earliest ages of Christianity, or follow it to its most complete
and harmonious development in the two centuries which preceded the
discovery of the printing press.
The primitive Christians were possessed with an unconquerable
repugnance to the introduction of images, and the first notice we have
of the use of pictures is in the censure of the Council of Illiberis,
300 years after the Christian era. Of these one of the earliest and
most curious specimens is the consecrated banner which animated the
victorious soldiers of Constantine. The Labarum was a long pike,
topped with a crown of gold, inclosing a monogram expressive of
the cross and the two initial letters of the name of Christ, and
intersected by a transverse beam, from which hung a silken vail
curiously inwrought with the images of the reigning monarch and his
children. A medal of the Emperor Constantius is said to be still
extant in which the mysterious symbol is accompanied with the
memorable words, "By this sign shalt thou conquer." The austere
simplicity of the Primitive Christians yielded at length to this
innovation of sacred splendor. Before the end of the sixth century the
use and even the worship of images, or pictorial representations of
sacred persons and subjects, was firmly established in the capital,
and those "made without hands" were propagated in the camps and cities
of the Eastern empire by monkish artists, whose flat delineations were
in the last degeneracy of taste.
In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the
East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was
proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by
the Latins of the Western church. Charlemagne, whose literary tastes
are attested by his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of
schools, and by his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave
a great impulse to the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines,
whose influence extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent
rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of
valuable manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set
apart for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin,
a member of their order, the important office of preparing a perfect
copy of the Scriptures.
The process of laving on and burnishing gold and silver appears
to have been familiar to oriental nations from a period of remote
antiquity, and the Greeks are supposed to have acquired from them the
art of thus ornamenting manuscripts, which they in turn communicated
to the Latins. Their most precious manuscripts were written in gold
or silver letters, on the finest semi-transparent vellum, stained of a
beautiful violet color (the imperial purple), and these were executed
only for crowned heads. One of the most ancient existing specimens of
this mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the _Codex Argenteus_
of Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered
in the library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This
fine MS. is written in letters of gold and silver on a purple ground;
and the fragments of a Greek MS. of the Eusebian Canons of the sixth
century, preserved in the British Museum, is perhaps a unique example
of a MS. in which both sides of the leaves are illuminated upon a
golden ground. Mr. Owen Jones' illustrations commence with a page
from the celebrated Durham book, or _Gospels of St. Cuthbert_, in
the Hiberno-Saxon style of the seventh century, which was borrowed
originally from the Romans, and afterward diffused throughout Europe
by the itinerant-Saxon Benedictines. This style is formed by an
ingenious disposition of interweaving threads or ribbons of different
colors, varied by the introduction of extremely attenuated lizard-like
reptiles, birds, and other animals. The initial letters are of
gigantic size, and of extreme intricacy, and are generally surrounded
with rows of minute red dots.
The Coronation Oath Book of the Anglo-Saxon kings is a curious
specimen of the rude state of art in the ninth century. The Lombard
and the Carlovingian styles, of which latter the Psalter of Charles
the Bold, is a fine specimen, prevailed on the continent during the
eighth and ninth centuries. Toward the end of the tenth century,
the Anglo-Saxon school, under the patronage of Bishop Ethelwold,
at Winchester, assumed a new and distinct character, which was not
surpassed by any works executed at the same period. This style, with
its bars of gold, forming complete frames to the text, when enriched
with interweaving foliage of the acanthus and the ivy, became the
basis of the latter and more florid school of illumination, which
attained its highest perfection in the twelfth century, and of which
the Arnstein Bible is an example. This Bible belonged to the Monks
of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, of Arnstein, and the value which was
attached to it may be inferred from the following quaint and mild
anathema at the end of the first volume:--
"The book of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, in Arnstein, the
which, if any one shall purloin it, may he die the death--may
he be cooked upon the gridiron--may the falling sickness and
fevers attack him--and may he be broken upon the wheel and
hung!"
In the thirteenth century Paris became celebrated for its
illuminators, and the productions of Franco-Bolognese, whose skill in
illuminating manuscripts was then paramount, is mentioned by Dante.
Mr. Humphreys thus graphically describes the style of the fourteenth
century:--
"It was a great artistic era--the architecture, the painting,
the goldsmith's work, the elaborate productions in enamel, and
the illuminator's art, were in beautiful harmony, being each
founded upon similar principles of design and composition;
even the art of writing lending itself to complete the chord
of artistic harmony, by adopting that, crisp and angular
feeling which the then general use of the pointed arch
introduced into all works of artistic combination."
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