ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 82, 7 April 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

ILLUMINATED BOOKS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

The first harbinger of the great change that was to come over the making of books I take to be the production in Italy of most beautifully - written copies of the Latin classics. These are often very highly ornamented ; and at first not only do they imitate (very naturally) the severe hands of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but even (though a long way off) the interlacing ornament of that period. In these books the writing, it must be said, is in its kind far more beautiful than the ornamenfr. There were so many written and pictured books produced in the fifteenth century that space quite fails me to write of them as their great merits deserve. In the middle of the century an invention, in itself trifling, was forced upon Europe by the growing demand for more and cheaper books Gutenberg somehow got hold of punches, matrices, the adjustable mould, and so of cast movable type. Schoeffer, MenteliD, and the rest of them caught up the art with the energy and skill so characteristic of the medieeval craftsman. The new German art spread like wildfire into every country of Europe ; and in a few years written books had become mere toys for the immensely rich. Yet the scribe, the rubricator. and the illuminator died hard. Decorated written books were produced in great numbers after printing had become common ; by far the greater number of these were Books of Hours, very highly ornamented and much pictured. Their style is as definite as any of the former ones, but it has now gone off the road of logical consistency ; for divorce has taken the place between the picture -work and the ornament. Often the pictures are exquisitely- finished miniatures belonging to the best schools of painting of the day ; but often also they are clearly the work of men who are employed to fill up a space, and have no interest in their work Bave livelihood. The ornament never fell quite so low as that, though us ornament it is not very " distinguished," and often, especially in the latest books, scarcely adds to the effect on the page of the miniature to which it is subsidiary. — William Morris, in the Magazine of Art.