Studio: international art (9.1897)

Beautiful Modern Manuscripts

fied according to the centuries the}7 appeared in.
Thus the twelfth century was famed for its pen-
and-ink work, consisting of outlined and shaded
capitals upon grounds of blue and green. In the
thirteenth century, beautifully conventionalised
leaves came into fashion, and painted miniatures
had a great vogue. The fourteenth century was
the heyday of the art. For brilliancy of colour,
beauty of contour, ingenuity and harmony of
design, that period was unsurpassed. The fifteenth
century opened with the flush of decay. Minia-
tures changed their backgrounds of burnished
gold for the landscape and architectural back-
grounds of the Van Eyck and Italian schools,
and naturalism invaded and paralysed the spirit of
ornament.

With the invention of printing, illumination fell
on evil times. Its old friend, the written word,

suddenly deserted it, and took a road whither it illuminated initial letter by edmond g. reuter
could not follow. If it is an ill wind that blows

nobody good, it is also a good wind that blows multiplied the symbols of speech, but curtailed
nobody ill, and printing, that root-pruned the tree their adjunct of beauty. Yet so strong was the
of knowledge till it burgeoned out over the whole tradition of embellishment, that it dared not utterly
earth, nipped, nevertheless, one blossom. It disregard it. It begun by leaving blank spaces for

the old decoration by hand. But wooden
blocks, printed in colour, soon ousted the
scribe, and printing gradually yielded to
the universal craze for cheapness, which
machinery, with its power of facile repro-
duction, has made the characteristic mania
of modern times. As people began to
prefer a thousand knick-knacks to one
»#t pearl of price, they grew prouder of a

library of cheap editions than of a few
rich and beautiful volumes. Cheap pub-
lications have their uses ; they extend the
influence of letters. Shakespeare can be
committed to heart from a shilling copy
as well as from a guinea one, which is
lucky for the poor man. The abuse is
when the moneyed public grudges its
classics a decent dress. But at last the
rage for cheapness for its own sake shows,
in the book trade at least, signs of sub-
siding, and beauty begins to be sought
again and commended.

As was natural, when illumination lost
its sphere of usefulness, it declined. The
Mw\ienserdpfo'm moice, scribe was superseded and his cunning

/Itidlbcifeinclificlohtvu-j perished. In the Church of Rome, indeed,

bo^OMlvno^lovciubcnvonrfvui^ the art that had served it so wellj foundj

[but boU) i riij red inn pure. J and still finds, a narrow asylum. The
.(>l^ilUK^)C^vcMcJint.cr^}/l(^. Apostolic Chamber continued to employ

»f^^f/.r1nsir.otx-eltrc?iUunlinatorSj and thence, under Pope
dovoou knoii;loN>c.Ibfll „,w1 - . Urban vm s Ant Maria Antonotius Auxi_

Gobcw dnewklwabc, j mas shed a pale ray on the seventeenth

For be on gKMlH^OMr'he<irt century. The doges of Venice, too, in

|/teaowcihng-plflCg ponne^ the "Ducales" enshrined some of the

later talent. But contemporary inspiration
had ceased, and the work of the period was
illuminated manuscript by w. b. macdougall mostly a mechanical repetition of the past.

49

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