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Eight Centuries of Book Decoration: Mirroring the Past |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Nigel Thorp |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 12/1/1987 |
| Size: 2,250 Words, 13,629 Characters |
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The art of the illuminated manuscript has long been neglected as a supposedly minor art compared with wall or panel painting. For people unable to visit the manuscript reading rooms of national, university, or other public libraries and museums, this art remains quite literally a closed book. In recent decades, however, it has gained increasing acceptance as an independent branch of the visual arts. Several exhibitions have brought to the public the range of work that scribes, illuminators, and miniaturists produced in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, before the new fifteenth-century invention of printing changed the means of making books as radically as electronic procedures are doing today.
The survival of these early books has been aided by the fact that the written word has alw...
. . .
...e was less suited for painting and gold-leaf decoration than vellum, which was smoother and less pliable. In the early sixteenth century, magnificent presentation copies still made use of traditional materials and methods, but the increasingly prohibitive cost of vellum and hand decoration, in the face of inexpensive printing, soon doomed the venerable art of book illumination to extinction.
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