DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14715#0076
THE AET OF ILLUMINATION.
39
These great men went to Nature for models, to enable them to give scope
to their inventive faculties, with a truthfulness which constant reference to
realities could alone impart to their productions. These primitive examples,
however, exhibit a large amount of conventional treatment, imperfect
drawing, and a deficient acquaintance with the principles of perspective and
chiaroscuro; but such deficiencies gradually disappeared, and henceforth
painting, and all the other branches of art, continued to make progress, till
they reached their highest degree of perfection in the latter part of the
fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries.
In book decorations henceforth the style generally adopted was the
renaissance, or the revival of ancient Roman characteristics, with such modifi-
cations as a new mode of treatment rendered necessary. These, like the larger
works of the time, were at first comparatively rude; but as each succeeding
age made an advance on the preceding one, the miniature paintings, with
their decorative accessories, found in Italian manuscripts of the latter period,
show an amount of refinement, of variety of invention, and of purely classical
feeling, superior to the equally finished productions of all other schools.
One of the earliest of these illuminators of which we find any printed
record is Oderigi of Gubbio, noticed by Dante in his " Purgatoria" (canto
ix); he died about a. d. 1300. His more celebrated pupil, Franco
Bolognese, likewise noticed by Dante, was living in 1313, and Simone
Memmi, the painter of Laura, and by whom there is a miniature of Virgil
in a manuscript of that poet in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, died at
Avignon, in 1342.
Vasari, in the life of Don Lorenzo, celebrated Don Jacopo, of Florence,
as the most distinguished letter-writer of Europe; in the fourteenth century
large letter-writing being a distinct occupation. This Don Jacopo left to his
convent, Degl' Angeli, sixteen folio choral books, with miniature illustrations
by a brother of the same convent, Don Silvestro ; and their extraordinary
skill was so highly venerated by their brother monks, that they embalmed
their right hands after their death, and preserved them in a tabernacle.
The paintings of the most eminent Italian artists were occasionally
copied in the large illuminated letters found in choral and other service-
books. An interesting instance of this fact is found in a magnificent letter
D, in the possession of Thomas Baring, Esq. M.P., which encloses a minia-
ture painting of the Agony in the Garden, copied from a larger one in oil
by Andrea Mantegna,—probably by one of his pupils. This painting by
Mantegna also belongs to Mr. Baring.
Altavante, a Florentine artist of the fifteenth century, was one of the
most celebrated illuminators of manuscripts. In the Library at Brussels is
39
These great men went to Nature for models, to enable them to give scope
to their inventive faculties, with a truthfulness which constant reference to
realities could alone impart to their productions. These primitive examples,
however, exhibit a large amount of conventional treatment, imperfect
drawing, and a deficient acquaintance with the principles of perspective and
chiaroscuro; but such deficiencies gradually disappeared, and henceforth
painting, and all the other branches of art, continued to make progress, till
they reached their highest degree of perfection in the latter part of the
fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries.
In book decorations henceforth the style generally adopted was the
renaissance, or the revival of ancient Roman characteristics, with such modifi-
cations as a new mode of treatment rendered necessary. These, like the larger
works of the time, were at first comparatively rude; but as each succeeding
age made an advance on the preceding one, the miniature paintings, with
their decorative accessories, found in Italian manuscripts of the latter period,
show an amount of refinement, of variety of invention, and of purely classical
feeling, superior to the equally finished productions of all other schools.
One of the earliest of these illuminators of which we find any printed
record is Oderigi of Gubbio, noticed by Dante in his " Purgatoria" (canto
ix); he died about a. d. 1300. His more celebrated pupil, Franco
Bolognese, likewise noticed by Dante, was living in 1313, and Simone
Memmi, the painter of Laura, and by whom there is a miniature of Virgil
in a manuscript of that poet in the Ambrosian Library, at Milan, died at
Avignon, in 1342.
Vasari, in the life of Don Lorenzo, celebrated Don Jacopo, of Florence,
as the most distinguished letter-writer of Europe; in the fourteenth century
large letter-writing being a distinct occupation. This Don Jacopo left to his
convent, Degl' Angeli, sixteen folio choral books, with miniature illustrations
by a brother of the same convent, Don Silvestro ; and their extraordinary
skill was so highly venerated by their brother monks, that they embalmed
their right hands after their death, and preserved them in a tabernacle.
The paintings of the most eminent Italian artists were occasionally
copied in the large illuminated letters found in choral and other service-
books. An interesting instance of this fact is found in a magnificent letter
D, in the possession of Thomas Baring, Esq. M.P., which encloses a minia-
ture painting of the Agony in the Garden, copied from a larger one in oil
by Andrea Mantegna,—probably by one of his pupils. This painting by
Mantegna also belongs to Mr. Baring.
Altavante, a Florentine artist of the fifteenth century, was one of the
most celebrated illuminators of manuscripts. In the Library at Brussels is