Part 7

To go back to the fourteenth century. In Italy the broken Lombard had given way to the general adoption of the modern gothic. Some excellent decorative work began to appear in the borders and miniatures of MSS. executed in Northern and Central Italy. As a rule in the earlier times, Italian miniatures were rude in drawing, and barbaric in colour like German and Spanish work; but in the thirteenth century a distinct Italian type arose, based at first on imitation of the semi-Byzantine art of Calabria and Sicily; but soon growing more national under the influence of Giotto. There is no resemblance in style or manner between the miniatures and borders of Italian artists, and {71}those of Northern Europe. The figures and faces are painted with opaque colour, and a broad brush; giving altogether a stronger impression of representing real men and women, than the exquisite drawing of the French artists, in which faces were washed with colour after having had the features drawn in with a pen or a fine brush. (Plate 12 shows the style of illustration used at Venice in the first half of the fourteenth century, in which there is a curious combination of French-like calligraphy with the painty miniatures of the home school of art.) There was in fact more of _modelling_ in the Italian illuminator's work in its purely national stage from about 1350 to 1450. After the later date a more subtle and minute delicacy in the drawing altered the character of the pictorial work. The borders which prevailed during 1320 to 1420 are also quite different from French work. Broad foliage of architectonic pattern hangs in soft tints of red and blue from a long upright slender pole like an ornamental curtain-rod, and little buds or drops of burnished gold fall here and there within the line of sight, but there is no attempt to fill up the spaces with any elaborate scheme of twining branches and real leaves and flowers, as in the French parallels. The writing is usually square and gothic, but with few of the oblique angles and little projecting points that are seen in Western gothic. The Lombardic hand of Eastern and Southern Italy, had left no trace in the script which succeeded it. The round and beautiful Carolingian letter of North Italy had a distinct influence in moulding the Italian gothic, and preserving its freedom from Teutonic angularities. It had lasted longer here than in other countries, but Spanish Visigothic was also a late lingerer, and did not succumb to French influence till the thirteenth century.

In Germany, the fourteenth century proceeded as elsewhere to produce a closely packed difficult Gothic letter, and also to introduce an ugly cursive which came generally into use in the next century. In decoration, the old {72}Germanic style had given way to the influence of French and Italian work, and a sort of new school was created, which in the following century became distinctively German. The cursive writing alluded to was an ugly rapid script deformed from the minuscule, which was very largely used in the fifteenth century, and developed in time the handwriting which still prevails in Germany, although gradually giving way to the Roman.

_English Work in the Fourteenth Century_

The cursive hand in England, as used between 1250 and 1550 for all purposes, and in legal documents for a long time afterwards, seems to have grown up in the early part of the thirteenth century. It is quite unlike the earlier charter hand, although it must have been derived from it. For the first century or more of its use, it is remarkable by reason of the long strokes which are broad and heavy above, but taper into thin lines below, those heavy heads being bifurcated in the earlier times and looped in the later. During the thirteenth and a great part of the fourteenth century it looked handsome, and could be read without difficulty; from the late part of the fourteenth century onwards it deteriorated both in aspect and in clearness. Nothing resembling this English hand was used on the continent, except (in a slight degree) in the notes written sometimes on the margins of philosophical and legal books, by means of a hard leaden stylus. Another cursive was also employed, which was merely the rapid writing of the gothic minuscule, like that of Germany; but this appeared rather on the continent.

It has been remarked that the Norman conquest introduced a new fashion in writing; but the observation is too strong. That event led gradually to the disuse of writing in the angular Anglo-Saxon letters, but had little influence on the fashion of the script used for writing Latin, which had become round and clear since the tenth century. The {73}Carolingian reformation had failed to supersede the Anglo-Irish hand, but its influence extended far enough to improve the shape even of the purely English letters. In Ireland, the angular character had fixed its type which has not since varied.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the English, as has been said above, began to relinquish the lead in calligraphy and ornamentation, which they had held since the twelfth. The Latin Bibles which had been produced towards the end of the twelfth century were usually folios of good size, written in a large and fine hand, and decorated with miniatures of the type seen in the Huntingfield Psalter. The fashion of the thirteenth century inclined to work of smaller dimensions, and the Bibles came out in small octavo or duodecimo size until the end of the century approached, when there was a tendency to revert to small folios. In the fourteenth century, a favourite size was quarto or small quarto. The illustrations in MSS. of both twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and of the beginning of the fourteenth, were similar in style, but varying in appearance according to the space allowed the artist.

_French Work in the Fourteenth Century_

The French took the lead in the fourteenth century, especially during the second half. There was not much to choose in the writing of the time in any country, but it was best in Italy. It was in the dainty adornment of their illuminated MSS., and in the fine and delicate beauty of the pictorial designs, that the French school now assumed its place of pre-eminence. The Apocalypse was a favourite book in the first half of this century, as it had been in the twelfth, and artists delighted in drawing pictures of its strange visions. These pictures were seldom quite original in design, since the earliest delineations had acquired a sort of traditional authority, but they were sufficiently variant in {74}particulars to exhibit the strength of the artist. Diapered and chequered patterns came more prominently into fashion along with the older use of burnished gold, for backgrounds; and a great deal of excellent work was done. An example from a French Apocalypse is given on plate 13. In most cases, the picture was drawn with a fine brush and the colours delicately washed in afterwards. French artists attained to singular perfection in this dainty method of illustration, and nothing of the kind excels some of the superior specimens. Amongst them will be found a number of charming Books of Hours executed at Bourges, Tours, and Paris, for Charles V of France and his brothers. Whatever may be thought of the beautiful paintings in Flemish and Italian MSS. at the end of the fifteenth century, it is undeniable that the last thirty years of the fourteenth produced French work which will hold its own against the illumination of any period or of any country. It is curious as showing how little the warfare against Edward III had affected the progress of art in France.

_The Fifteenth Century_

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a dynasty of French princes established in the Duchy of Burgundy, and the union of the states which had belonged to the Counts of Flanders, to the Duke's dominions. These political circumstances had the effect of diverting some of the best French miniaturists to the court of Philippe le Hardi, and of founding a grand Burgundian school of art, which led to the creation of the Flemish one. The Burgundian MSS. of the first half of the fifteenth century were usually executed at Dijon (the capital of the Duchy) or Besancon; and were thus simply works of French art, not very different in style from those produced at Bourges, Nevers, and Auxerre; but a certain local type was developed in the ornamental borders of the miniatures; and as soon as the political centre of gravity {75}was shifted northwards, by reason of the greater wealth and importance of the Low Countries, Bruges and Brussels became the chief towns in Philip the Good's dominions, and a new element was introduced into Burgundian art. The Flemish artists of Bruges, Lille, and Liege had been renowned since the middle of the fourteenth century for their skill in miniature painting, and Van Eyck himself was a dependent of Philippe le Bon, in whose service he spent the last nine years of his life at Bruges (1432-1440). It is supposed that the earlier Flemish artists were the creators of grisaille painting, although that beautiful mode of pictorial illustration is first found in French books of the middle of the fourteenth century. (A specimen is given on plate 14.) The finest examples of grisaille were produced by Flemish artists at Bruges between 1440 and 1470, and a book of Hours, illuminated for Jaquot de Brégilles in 1443, in the possession of the writer, is one of remarkable beauty. Another fine specimen, of somewhat later date, is the Miroir Historial, a miniature from which is reproduced on plate 17. Side by side with this kind of chaste work, splendid illumination of the rich French style was practised in Flanders, and a favourable example is given of a Book of Hours painted at Tournay about 1460, on plate 16.

Grisaille painting originated evidently from the suggestions of carved stone-work in cathedral-decoration. The figures of saints occupying niches, which were familiar to the visitants of churches, were the first models that led to the painting of miniatures with the figures in grey tints. It must have been, for a true artist, delightful to triumph over the difficulty of achieving the effects of relief and of modelling with the aid of a single pigment only. To be the master of such an art, and to handle the monochrome in such a way as to run with perfect touch through a gamut of gradations in tone, would surely have been more gratifying than to win success by the splendour of full illumination. The artist did not, however, entirely abstain {76}from the use of gold; he allowed it to shine on the crowns of kings and around the heads of his saints; and colour was used sparingly in the backgrounds. These backgrounds in the pictures of earlier date were ornamental diapered surfaces, but after the first decade or two of the fifteenth century, landscape backgrounds made their appearance. It was, however, some time before the miniaturist succeeded in realising effects of distance, and thus producing true pictures as distinguished from ornamental historiation. The Italians were the first to gain a tolerable knowledge of perspective, but the Flemings were not much behind them. It was not, however, till late in the fifteenth century that anything like a faithful expression of perspective is found in the miniatures of MSS.

In the latter part of the fifteenth century, pure grisaille was extended into camaieu; that is, the monochrome might be any other colour than grey, so long as it was used in the same manner. This, however, was usually confined to parts of miniatures, and not inconsistent with a lavish use of gold for the lights, and masses of different colour in other portions of the same picture. The quantity of gold that gave magnificence to the work of the miniaturist in Flanders and France in the last quarter of the fifteenth century became excessive. It was a relief to the eye when this blaze of gold receded before the outcome of late Flemish art. Scarcely any school produced work comparable for delicacy and truth to the miniatures painted in prayerbooks at Bruges and Ghent between 1490 and 1520.

_Illuminated Borders in the Fifteenth Century_

After the year 1400, as has been already said, the private Prayerbooks, or Books of Hours, which at that time were used in France and England, but not to any great extent elsewhere, began to increase in numbers and develop new styles of ornament. The pages with illuminated {77}initials still preserved the older border, the basis of which was a double line of gold and colour issuing from the initial and running squarely round the page. At the corners and at intervals gold branches, bearing gold and coloured ivy-leaves, went forth in somewhat stiff curves to form the outer decoration of the border. This was in French MSS. In the English ones, heavy masses of gold and colour representing conventional foliage appeared at the corners, and out of the border-lines emerged the long sweeping tufts of feathery grass with red and blue buds, which have been already alluded to. Towards 1430 the ivy-leaves lost their prominence in France, and were only preserved in portion of the ornament. The straight framing lines were abandoned both in England and France, and a broader border was obtained by a methodical arrangement of hundreds of curling hair-lines, black or brown, out of which sprung little red and blue flowers of natural appearance. This pattern was drawn and massed so as to represent a broad frame, even and square, enclosing the page. This became a customary mode of ornamentation in both countries, so that a large proportion of English and French work was much alike in style, though not always in execution. When the middle of the century arrived, a modification began to take place in French MSS.; the fine black hair-lines of the borders gave place to wreathing green branches, less numerous, and thus more proportionate in quantity. The flowers and leaves springing from them became more numerous, more natural and less conventional. By this time Burgundian and Flemish Livres d'Heures were also produced in large numbers, and brilliant pictures of blossoms growing in the rich gardens of Burgundy added the weight of their influence to the tendency towards floral decoration. The flowers in the borders grew more realistic and varied, and were sometimes fine large examples of their species. This method was followed in England as well as in France. Next appeared {78}in continental work backgrounds, either of gold or of colour, to the borders; which had previously been painted on the plain vellum. Finally, in France it became fashionable to break the border into spaces (taking various shapes), of which some had gold grounds and some were without grounds; or to treat the border in such a fashion that the branches and flowers should appear partly on gold, partly on russet, partly on blue, or in other combinations. This bizarre fashion did not take the taste either of English or of Flemish artists. The English retained their crowded border of flowers and branches painted on the plain vellum, while the Flemings began to paint rich natural cut flowers upon a monochromatic ground of pale gold or yellow. On this pale ground, free from all the convolution of twining branches seen in French and English work, they were enabled to throw shadows beneath the cut flowers, so that these appeared to stand out in strong relief, with excellent effect. The new fashion at once found copyists everywhere; the celebrated Hours of Anne of Brittany is one of the finer French examples. The imitations done in England were not very successful.

_End of the Fifteenth Century_

We now reach the last decade of the fifteenth century; in which the late Flemish school already alluded to arose in Bruges and Ghent. In combination with those beautiful borders of fresh cut flowers painted in apparent relief upon pale gold or yellow, the delicate art of Memling and Gerard David produced small and exquisite miniatures with architectural and landscape accessories; the like of which had not yet been seen in the illustration of books, unless we find a parallel in the lovely and no less exquisite pictures in Florentine manuscripts of the same period. The radical difference between the work of the north and that of the {79}south--notwithstanding that each of them betrays to some extent the influence of the other--is, that the Fleming took his types from real life, the Florentine from his conceptions of angelic existence.

All the rest of Europe was behind the two favoured countries in which pictorial and decorative art now reached their culminating point. Sentimental writers have been, from time immemorial, in the habit of scouting at wealth and of pouring enthusiastic praise upon penury, as though the two conditions were equivalent to vice and virtue in morals, to dulness and genius in intellect. It is quite true that an impoverished state of society produces better poetry than a rich one; but it is equally true that the finest artistic work is born amid luxurious surroundings. It was the wealth of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels which attracted talent to a warmer air in which it could grow and flourish, on the border land between the Celt and the Teuton, with all the advantages derivable from either side. In the same way the riches and luxury of Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Verona, Cremona, Padua, stimulated the faculties of men who had inherited the traditions of Græco-Roman art. It was a brilliant autumn in the annals of illumination, but a short one, by reason of the changes which the new art of Printing had brought about in all things. Dürer visited Bruges and Venice; he admired the work of Gerard David and of the Italian miniaturists, but he did not seek to imitate or to rival their efforts. He belonged to the modern world, and he gave to the art of engraving what he would, twenty years earlier, have given to the art of illumination. We have nothing to do here with his profession as a painter of canvases in which he followed the same tendency as had during the fifteenth century so wonderfully multiplied the number of Giotto's descendants in Italy. We may imagine, if we choose, what wonderful illuminators of manuscripts were lost in Schongauer, Dürer, and Lucas van Leyden, three men who owed {80}their artistic existence and taste to the atmosphere of rich cities. From the year 1450 the career of Calligrapher and Illuminator had been doomed to extinction. Its members gradually retired from an unequal strife with the clever mechanics from Mentz; some became printers, some became engravers, and others joined the ranks of the canvas-painters. Those who remained true to their early training achieved the most brilliant triumphs of their profession before it was extinguished. This is the reason why we look to the Flanders, and to the Italy of 1480-1520, for the most absolutely perfect work that was ever produced in the illumination of manuscripts. Considering that it flourished side by side with the paintings of the Bellinis and of Andrea Mantegna, and that it was in touch with the times of Lionardo, of Raphael, of Michel Angiolo, of Titian, and of Paolo Veronese, we cannot wonder either at its marvellous beauty or at its sudden withering.

Of the late Flemish school, certain work done for the Austrian Archduchess Margaret (resident in Bruges with her brother Philip, as children of Maximilian who had become sovereign of the Low Countries in right of his wife Mary of Burgundy), of which the famous Grimani Breviary is only one amongst some ten or twelve examples--was the finest of its kind. The present writer has possessed one of them--a little volume internally justifying the tradition that it was illuminated by Gerard David for the Archduchess

( . . Margot la gente demoiselle Qu' eut deux maris et si mourut pucelle

as she once suggested for her own epitaph when in danger from a storm at sea) for presentation to her sister-in-law Juana, the heiress of Castile (Juana la Loca, the Crazy Jane who has become a personage in nursery lore).

As for the Italian school, it was of wider extent. The illuminators found generous patrons at Milan, at Venice, at Padua, at Cremona, at Verona, at Florence, at Bologna, at Rome, and at Naples. In the last city, the Kings of {81}Aragonese origin were noble employers of talent, and found their chief rivals in the Medicis, and in Mathias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, who divided with them the patronage of the best Italian miniaturists. They also helped to stamp on Spanish work the Italian impress which characterises it in the last half of the fifteenth century, and thereby to continue the line which in contact with Naples on the one hand, with Bruges on the other, formed at the end of the century a ring, uniting Flanders and Italy as its chief jewels.

The name of Attavante, so famous as a Florentine miniaturist, reminds me of a Petrarch manuscript which I have seen sold in Paris as illustrated by him. One of the illuminations contained a bust of a Roman warrior, in the style so frequently seen in Italian work of about the year 1500, and under it were the initials M.A., intended evidently for Marcus Aurelius or Marcus Antonius. Out of them, the cataloguers of two different collections of great repute, had evolved the idea that they stood for "Maestro Attavante"--an absurd notion for which there was absolutely no excuse whatever. Other famous Italian miniaturists were Girolamo dai Libri of Verona, and Sigismondo da Carpio. I have had examples of the art of both. One still more celebrated was Giulio Clovio, but he belonged entirely to the sixteenth century and to the late Renaissance, and his work is in nowise that of the Middle Ages. It is over-florid and reveals the theatrical splendour which always accompanies decline. I have possessed one of his finest examples, which was formerly in the Towneley library.

During the last twenty years of the fifteenth century, a favourite style of border among the Italians was an imitation of goldsmith's work. Gems of various colours set in gold, with cameos or medallions of classic busts, were the chief feature, but spaces were always left in which the miniaturist could paint his tiny exquisite figures of the fight between David and Goliath, or something of the kind. Venetian {82}examples of such miniatures are remarkably beautiful--the beauty mingled with a certain gravity of manner; those which are of Roman origin have an air of masterly splendour; but those which were produced at Florence between 1480 and 1510 are so lovely as to upset our critical judgment in comparing them with work done at Bruges. In the border-illustration there never was any resemblance between the work of Italy and that of other countries, and there can be no hesitation in deciding between them in favour of Italy as more appropriately decorative.

I possess a Psalter written and illuminated for Pietro dei Medici, apparently about 1490, in which the first two pages are stained light green, so as to soften and make delicate the numerous tints found in the painting and border upon one of them. These are the work probably of Attavante, and can hardly be excelled for the exquisite taste and finish both of the miniature and of the ornamentation. I have also had a charming little Prayerbook written for Lorenzo the Magnificent, which was evidently from the same hand; and a Siennese Psalter of kindred type and of the same period. The loveliness of these Tuscan examples takes away all possibility of critical fault-finding. They delight the eye with a fuller satisfaction than even the best of the Flemish illuminations. The latter we examine carefully, with a continual increase of admiration; while we enjoy the harmonious beauty of the Florentine, we feel that the critic's functions are set aside.