Author: Rowan Watson
Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum
ISBN: 9780810966062
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The magnificent pages of medieval missals, books of hours, breviaries, and bibles sparkle with detail illuminating the world in which they were created. This splendid volume, featuring some of the finest illuminated masterpieces from the exceptional collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, details the remarkable collaboration and craftsmanship that went into the creation of these delicate treasures. Close-up details show the intricacies of the various techniques used to create these fragile and rarely seen works. By helping the reader to appreciate the individual elements of illumination--the initials, borders, illustrations, script, and binding--Rowan Watson brings the world of the scribes, illuminators, and book dealers to life, and sheds light on the cooperative religious communities in which many of them worked. Watson also looks at the survival of illumination after the printing press and its revival in the 19th century in the hands of such pioneering designers as Owen Jones and William Morris.
Author: Mary Wellesley
Publisher: riverrun
ISBN: 9781529400946
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
'This book is an expression of love... Sublimely conceived and beautifully written' Gerard DeGroot, The Times 'Immersive, conversational and intensely visual' Helen Castor ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Manuscripts teem with life. They are not only the stuff of history and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence we have of entire lives, long receded. Hidden Hands tells the stories of the artisans, artists, scribes and readers, patrons and collectors who made and kept the beautiful, fragile objects that have survived the ravages of fire, water and deliberate destruction to form a picture of both English culture and the wider European culture of which it is part. Without manuscripts, she shows, many historical figures would be lost to us, as well as those of lower social status, women and people of colour, their stories erased, and the remnants of their labours destroyed. From the Cuthbert Bible, to works including those by the Beowulf poet, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Sir Thomas Malory, Chaucer, the Paston Letters and Shakespeare, Mary Wellesley describes the production and preservation of these priceless objects. With an insistent emphasis on the early role of women as authors and artists and illustrated with over fifty colour plates, Hidden Hands is an important contribution to our understanding of literature and history.
Author: Jonathan James Graham Alexander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060737
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Who were the medieval illuminators? How were their hand-produced books illustrated and decorated? In this beautiful book Jonathan Alexander presents a survey of manuscript illumination throughout Europe from the fourth to the sixteenth century. He discusses the social and historical context of the illuminators' lives, considers their methods of work, and presents a series of case studies to show the range and nature of the visual sources and the ways in which they were adapted, copied, or created anew. Alexander explains that in the early period, Christian monasteries and churches were the main centers for the copying of manuscripts, and so the majority of illuminators were monks working in and for their own monasteries. From the eleventh century, lay scribes and illuminators became increasingly numerous, and by the thirteenth century, professional illuminators dominated the field. During this later period, illuminators were able to travel in search of work and to acquire new ideas, they joined guilds with scribes or with artists in the cities, and their ranks included nuns and secular women. Work was regularly collaborative, and the craft was learned through an apprenticeship system. Alexander carefully analyzes surviving manuscripts and medieval treatises in order to explain the complex and time-consuming technical processes of illumination - its materials, methods, tools, choice of illustration, and execution. From rare surviving contracts, he deduces the preoccupation of patrons with materials and schedules. Illustrating his discussion with examples chosen from religious and secular manuscripts made all over Europe, Alexander recreates the astonishing variety and creativity ofmedieval illumination. His book will be a standard reference for years to come.
Author: Bryan C. Keene
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 160606598X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.
Author: Enluminures (Firm)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780991517220
Category : Illumination of books and manuscripts, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
Author: Mary Wellesley
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII “A delight—immersive, conversational, and intensely visual, full of gorgeous illustrations and shimmering description.” –Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status—part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writing, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival. The Gilded Page is the story of the written word in the manuscript age. Rich and surprising, it shows how the most exquisite objects ever made by human hands came from unexpected places. “Mary Wellesley is a born storyteller and The Gilded Page is as good as historical writing gets. This is a sensational debut by a wonderfully gifted historian.” —Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and The Templars
Author: Rowan Watson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Books
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
Illumination- the art of 'lighting up' a page through the use of illustration to break up text and make it more comprehensible. Illuminated Manuscripts and their Makers describes the extraordinary collective skill and artistry that went into the making of these medieval masterpieces and features pages from the finest examples in the collections of the V&A, some never published before. Illuminated manuscripts are widely recognised as among the most beautiful objects of the western world. This is a book about their making- about the many talents involved in producing the missals, books of hours, brevaries and bibles that astonish us still with their richness and beauty. Illuminated manuscripts were collaborative productions, with different specialists contributing script, initials, borders, illustration, and binding to any work. Rowan Watson's study is both scholarly and rich in anecdote; he not only brings individual scribes adn book dealers vividly to life but also throws light on the commercial and religious environments in which they worked, and on the cooperative working practices devised for their production. The illustrations are drawn from the exceptional and largely unpublished collections of the V&A, and the text offeres us an entirely new look at the subject, treating illumination as a key to the history of the period as much as an expression of medieval and Renaissance (and neo-Gothic) styles and sensibilities.
Author: Rowan Watson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781851773862
Category : Illumination of books and manuscripts
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
Illumination is the art of 'lighting up' a page through the use of illustration to break up text and make it more comprehensible. This work describes the extraordinary skill and artistry that went into the making of these medieval masterpieces.
Author: Michael Camille
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780232500
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
What do they all mean – the lascivious ape, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests and somersaulting jongleurs to be found protruding from the edges of medieval buildings and in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? Michael Camille explores that riotous realm of marginal art, so often explained away as mere decoration or zany doodles, where resistance to social constraints flourished. Medieval image-makers focused attention on the underside of society, the excluded and the ejected. Peasants, servants, prostitutes and beggars all found their place, along with knights and clerics, engaged in impudent antics in the margins of prayer-books or, as gargoyles, on the outsides of churches. Camille brings us to an understanding of how marginality functioned in medieval culture and shows us just how scandalous, subversive, and amazing the art of the time could be.
Author: Richard H. Rouse
Publisher: Harvey Miller
ISBN: 9781912554287
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Series statement and numbering from Brepols Publishers website.
