Part 8

The writing of the late Italian MSS., among which classical texts rival the books of prayers in the elegance of their adornment, was more frequently Roman than gothic, but a fine black-letter hand survived into the sixteenth century, especially at Venice. The initials decorated with interlacements, in a style that evinced its Irish origin, which are found in Italian manuscripts after 1350 were retained till near the end of the fifteenth century in Venice and Naples, but they had fallen out of use in Tuscany {83}somewhat earlier, being hardly appropriate to the rich neo-classical style of Florentine border-decoration.

As for the Italian styles of writing after the twelfth century, they were various. The Carolingian in a bold and handsome type lasted longer in Italy than elsewhere; but both it and the Lombard were passing away about the year 1200. The thirteenth century saw the evolution of the gothic letter out of the Carolingian, in Italy as well as over the rest of Europe, but in Italy it was accompanied by a sort of Carolingian cursive, slightly sloped, which finally developed the two forms now familiar over all the world--Roman and Italic. In the fourteenth century a beautiful square gothic letter was in use in Italy, and remained unaltered in form till the end of the fifteenth; but it was not unaccompanied by various other styles of writing. The Italic was still in its primitive stage without elegance, and some books were written in a gothic letter derived from French and German models, and quite unlike the square Italian gothic. The script of the book, from which a facsimile is given on plate 12, is an example of this outlandishness. Before the fifteenth century arrived the cursive hand had split into its two branches. The more elaborately written letters were upright, and tended to restore the Carolingian original; the less elaborate characters began to slope still further, and by degrees became a separate script, which then became cultivated. The writing of Petrarch (who died in 1374) was chosen as the model for the first Italic types used in printing (1501); and the upright round hand used by numerous Florentine and Venetian calligraphers towards the middle of the fifteenth century was chosen as the model of the first Roman types, cut by Sweynheym and Pannartz in the Benedictine monastery of Subbiaco, not far from Rome, in the year 1464.

_Remarks on the subjects reproduced in the plates_

The first plate represents portion of a hieroglyphical {84}text written on a roll of papyrus which was wrapped up with the mummy of the man whose virtues are recorded on it. As for the exact age and contents of the roll, it is beyond my capacity to say anything definite; but there is a delicacy in the drawing of the figures and in the formation of the letters which seem to indicate a considerable age, probably not less than twelve hundred years B.C. Each column of the writing has to be read from top to bottom, beginning with the first column on the left. It has been said in an earlier page that the hieratic and demotic scripts differed from the hieroglyphic in being written like Hebrew in long horizontal lines from right to left. The difference is, however, merely formal. If we turn the hieroglyphic page half round, so that the right side becomes the bottom, and the left side the top of the page, we can see the inscription run in hieratic fashion from right to left.

Plate 2 is perhaps more difficult to decipher than Plate 1. We know, however, that the demotic script was used only amongst laymen in matters of business and of money; and this no doubt represents some commercial transaction that took place between 500 and 200 B.C. The demotic was a complex cursive evolved from the hieratic; its invention, or at least its use to any considerable degree, does not appear to have been much antecedent to 600 B.C., and there was little necessity for its continuance after the second century B.C.

It was probably about the beginning of the Christian era that the demotic finally disappeared before the Coptic, an alphabet derived from the Greek, of which Plate 3 gives an example. The Arabic heading which accompanies the Coptic rubric above the Psalm that begins below (the 118th [Greek: riê]), is in a hand of the latter part of the fifteenth century. Notwithstanding the lateness of the specimen, the script takes its proper place here as representing a script of the first century.

Plate 4 is taken from a copy, written on vellum at {85}Nablús, of the Samaritan Pentateuch. Both in language and in letters it represents the old Hebrew of the days of Solomon, long anterior to the time when Ezra introduced from Chaldæa the square characters now called Hebrew; the ancient letters having been preserved by a small remnant in North Palestine. The writing resembles that of the Phoenicians, and the example given on plate 4, notwithstanding its lateness, does not exhibit a very much modified form of the character.

Plate 5 is from an Abyssinian MS. of the sixteenth century, on the Life of the Virgin. The real origin of the artistic decoration is unmistakable. It is what we call Byzantine, but ought rather to be called Ægypto-Grecian. The people of Abyssinia, who were mainly Southern Arabs or Sabæans, received their instruction in art along with their Christianity a few centuries after the beginning of the era, and they have never abandoned them. As for the writing which appears on the plate, it is in the old Geez or Ethiopic language, and descended from that of the Sabæan people whose monumental inscriptions in Himyaritic language and characters are now attracting considerable interest.

Plate 6 is from a Greek Gospelbook written on vellum, which was brought to England from Cyprus by Cesnola. The ornamental border at the top is somewhat freer and less stiff in style than those which we find in most of the Byzantine MSS.; and the writing is neater and less negligent than if it had been executed in the eleventh or twelfth century. It slopes a little backwards and has the breathings in their antique form as halves of the letter H. Hence I have assigned it to the latter part of the tenth century.

On plate 7 I have given a reduction after Westwood of a page from an Irish MS. now in the Archiepiscopal Library at Lambeth. Although it is of comparatively late date (the ninth century), and the writing is the Irish script in its second or wholly minuscule stage, the ornamentation is {86}sufficient to show what Irish work had been and still was. The marvellously elaborate convolutions and interlacements, the dexterous use of colours, the utter absence of gold, and the introduction of grotesque animal figures, are all seen in this plate from the Gospelbook of MacDurnan. (While I write I am reminded of a personal experience which I may be forgiven for setting down in print. When Westwood's great book had come out, I was one day speaking with an English lady of high social position, cultivated and accomplished in many branches of knowledge, to whom after mentioning Westwood I expressed my admiration of what the Irish calligraphers had done in the seventh and eighth centuries, when art was so low in most of the other lands of Europe. The lady listened with patient good-breeding, till I paused, and then said quietly, "I presume that you are yourself an Irishman!" She had evidently mistaken one unfamiliar accent for another, and her remark was a polite criticism upon my credulity or veracity.)

Plate 21 (which ought to have been inserted in succession to plate 7) reproduces a miniature from a Breviary written about 1150-60 for Isengrim, Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Ottenbeuern in Suabia.

The miniature reproduced is a picture of the Ascension, and shows the Saviour standing in an almond-shaped frame, supported and borne aloft by four angels. The Virgin and the Apostles are looking upwards from below, and the picture is enclosed within a square blue border, this being lighted by ornamental fretwork in white. The faces are generally well drawn, and the rapt attention in the eyes of the uplookers is very skilfully depicted. The colours used are blue, green, yellow, red, chesnut, and white. The whole effect is reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon work, and one might easily, at first sight, mistake it for a picture out of an English book of the tenth century. A somewhat similar design of the same subject is found in King Athelstan's Psalter--an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the late ninth century, now {87}in the British Museum; but the Suabian illustration is decidedly inferior in taste and delicacy of treatment. It shows, however, such a kinship that we are inclined to believe in a nearer connexion between German and English art than between German and French Carolingian.

Plates 8 and 9 reproduce miniatures from two manuscripts of the Latin Bible,--the first page of Genesis in each. The first is either English or Norman work, perhaps rather the latter than the former, and is interesting as affording one of the earliest examples of the border with leaves of the so-called ivy pattern. The writing is a beautiful early gothic of the transition period between the Carolingian round hand and the mediæval square gothic. It is unmistakably Norman, if not Anglo-Norman, but may have been English. If the reds in the tiny miniatures had been a little more pinkish, and the blue a little lighter, we should have had no hesitation in calling it English work. In plate 9, the writing is somewhat rounder and the ink is paler--showing that the work is neither English nor Norman; and we find in the minute pictures a style of design, both in the figures and the draperies, which reminds us of late classical art. The interlaced pattern in the lowest portion of the ornament is also a survival of the Celtic manner which might be found in Southern France, but which had ceased to be used in English work, except in the decoration of letters. On the plate, the picture is dated "1310-20"; but we may venture to think that it was executed in South-Eastern France about the year 1300.

The design and the writing on plate 10 are thoroughly English of the end of the thirteenth century. The picture is unfinished, having been left by the artist in its sketch-condition, uncoloured. The faces are blank, and the drawing simply in outline; but the careful treatment of the folds in the drapery is remarkable. The miniature is one of several illustrating the Apocalypse, which were done in the convent at Eaton or Nun-Eaton in Warwickshire about 1280. The {88}Apocalypse is not given in its Latin summaries, as was usual, but in French quatrains of English origin. The volume which contains these drawings is interesting, as having been a sort of _omnium gatherum_, made up for the ladies of Eaton at the end of the thirteenth century. One of the pieces it contains is a Bestiaire by William the Trouvère, an Englishman of the twelfth century; a French poem called the Chastel d'Amours by Raymond Grosseteste; and a popular English poem of the time, of which another example has been lately published in facsimile in his "English Palæography" by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat.

The miniature of the Crucifixion which is reproduced on plate 11 is visibly Italian work of the rudest style. It is taken from a Missal, written in a hand which is also Italian of the end of the thirteenth century, but gothic in form. The liturgical character of the book is, however, such that we may believe it to have been produced in England, perhaps by an Italian Cistercian monk. The writing on the miniature is in so-called Lombardic uncials, a script which was used for capitals nearly everywhere in the thirteenth century. The three figures in the picture have red or auburn hair, a favourite colour at all times among the Italians, even after the Flemings had introduced a blackhaired Christ. Another noticeable feature is the building with an arcade and windows, in the lower background.

Plate 12 is an illustration of the story of Troilus and Cressida, taken from Guido Colonna's Tale of Troy. It is Venetian, of about the years 1330-40, and exhibits the Italian style of using strong pigments for their figures. Whatever the faults of drawing may be, this is a real painting done with a full brush. There is no appearance of the outlines drawn with a pen or a fine brush, such as we see in French and English work, and the folds in the draperies appear to be produced by broad shadowings after the main body of colour had been painted. In fact, it seems to be, like other Italian illuminations, the work of a painter, not {89}of a miniaturist. The place of origin is revealed by the calligrapher's instructions to the artist, which occur on several pages in a minute hand, and which are written in a pure Venetian dialect. The manuscript is illustrated with an unusual quantity of pictorial designs. The writing is remarkable as resembling that of the English charters of the same period, but with greater regularity and evenness in the downstrokes.

Plate 13 is reproduced from a French Apocalypse of the fourteenth century, with a text in French prose. The writing is gothic, much changed from the style of the thirteenth century, and less regular and elegant. The picture is thoroughly French, of the time when English illuminators had yielded up their supremacy to the men of the French school. We see the fine outlines and features as we are accustomed to see them in thirteenth century work, offering in their delicate style a curious contrast to the broad free paintiness of the illustration in plate 12. The Apocalypse, from which the plate is taken, is a French work of the middle of the fourteenth century, showing a good deal of the feeling of the preceding century, but tending visibly towards the manner of the time when Charles V of France and his brothers were associated with manuscripts of an unusually beautiful kind.

Plate 14 is an example of French grisaille in its earlier stage. The four designs look like fine chalk drawings prepared for the use of an engraver, rather than like finished illustrations in a book. There is an ease and freedom in the figure-drawing which reveal the hand of a true artist, and the treatment of the draperies is excellent; but the landscape accessories in the lower two divisions are primitive in their absurdity and childish execution. The writing in this example, and in plate 13 also, is typical fourteenth century gothic; small, cramped, square, and angular. The border is of the early ivy-leaf pattern, stiff and not natural, but not inelegant as decoration. The style and character of {90}the two plates are essentially French, and could not be found in examples of illumination at the period anywhere outside of France.

Plate 15 introduces us to a totally different kind and style of ornament. There is no appearance of stiffness here in the border, with its bold conventional foliage of light blue and green, and the long feathery lines that sweep out from it in free and graceful curves. The miniature too is full of merit both in design and execution, its only drawback being the rather ugly pattern of the green flooring. The seated priest is in the full costume of a doctor or literatus of Chaucer's time; and the expression in his features, as well as in those of the kneeling Gower, is excellently rendered. The writing here is not the square angular gothic of the two preceding plates, but a more rounded script, partaking of the nature of the charter hand, which was appropriated to the English language. The a is the only letter in it quite identical with that of the fourteenth century gothic, and the p (for _th_) shows the survival of Anglo-Saxon writing, just as the w shows us a modern English letter at a tolerably early stage of its growth. The k is likewise noteworthy, as being the peculiar form of the letter which had been evolved in the rapid writing of court-scribes, and which is still used in German manuscript.

Plate 16 shows us Franco-Flemish art in a phase in which the simple mastery of design had become subordinate to the brilliancy and magnificence of decoration. The inner border of interwoven blue and red lines upon a ground of gold is connected with, and grows out of, the illuminated initial in a suitably appropriate fashion, but the outer border of conventional foliage, red, blue, green, and yellow, with its inserted figures of a kneeling man and a hybrid dromedary, has no comprehensible affinity to the rest of the work, and is tacked on without any reason beyond the desire for splendour and variety. The style is not distinctively Flemish, although the painting was done at {91}Tournay. It is rather a development out of Franco-Burgundian models, and more suggestive of French origin than any other; in fact, the extension of central French influence northwards through Burgundy.

In plate 17 there is real Flemish work. Here is pure grisaille at its best; no infusion of extraneous colour in the design, except in the tesselated pavement of yellow and white marble, and no glitter of illumination beyond what is given by a gold crown in the hands of one figure, and a couple of gold chains on the breasts of two others. This is indeed a true historical picture broadly conceived, well composed, and admirably executed. The perspective is excellent, and we realise clearly the size and depth of the large vaulted chamber, lighted only from the doorways and the open window-spaces,--in which the eight personages are grouped. The manuscript from which the miniature is taken was written and illustrated, almost undoubtedly, at Bruges about 1470 for a nobleman of the Lannoy family, a member not of the principal house which still flourished in Flanders, but of the transplanted branch in Picardy.

Plate 18 is taken from an English manuscript of considerable interest. A number of armorial bearings, which are found on the margins of the pages, show that it was written either for the Marquis of Dorset, Edward IV's son-in-law, or for one of his children. Whichever was the case, the book was in the possession of John Grey, dominus de Blisworth, the son or near relative of the Marquis, in the early part of the sixteenth century; and there is a record added in the calendar of the death of Dame Elizabeth Grey, this John's wife, about 1520-30. The miniatures are good, but not excellent; better in composition than in design, and showing grave deficiencies with regard to perspective. They are, however, well executed and well painted; and the borders are remarkably elegant. The conventional large foliage, of architectonic character, is admirably disposed upon small and appropriate fields of gold; and the twining {92}branchlets that bear tiny buds and small leaves and flowers are not so crowded as to hide the vellum ground. The border is indeed a fine decorative composition, without a fault, and thoroughly English in style. There is an inscription at the foot of the miniature which inspires curiosity to learn who the writer was. She was evidently a woman of high position; for only such a personage would have been allowed to write in a Prayerbook of the kind. The words are, "Madame, I pray you remember her that ys yours and evver sall be," but the bookbinder has unfortunately cut off the signature. The person addressed was no doubt Dame Elizabeth Grey. The writing is strangely like that of Henry VII, but cannot of course have been his. It is possibly as late as 1520.

Plate 22 is from a Prayerbook written and illuminated about 1520-30 for a certain Giovanni Bentivoglio. If the book had been a dozen or twenty years earlier than it seems to be, one might have supposed that it was executed at Bologna, by the order and for the use of the last Bentivoglio who ruled in that city. As, however, he died in exile and misfortune in 1508, the Giovanni to whom the prayerbook belonged, must have been his grandson, born about 1510, who was in the imperial service in 1530. The artistic merit of the illumination is considerable, but they are over-florid and mark a decay of taste. The colours are vivid and harmonious, gold is plentifully used, and the beauty of the work is undeniable; but it is meretricious and corrupt in style. Italian examples of the period are, however, rare and highly prized.

On plate 19 we have a large initial (O) cut from an Italian Antiphonal or Gradual, written probably about 1540-50. It encloses a miniature representing the Adoration of the three Kings, painted with so much skill as to suggest the hand of some student of Titian's school. In design, composition, and execution, it is very good; the only drawback being the superfine air of courtly elegance {93}which is seen in every figure beneath the thatched roof of the stable. There is a theatrical character in the whole performance, that reminds us of Federico Baroccio.

Of similar date is the picture on plate 20. It comes from a Gospel-lesson book, written in a mitred abbey on the German side of the Rhine, probably not far from Cologne, in the year 1548. The design of the company of monks headed by their Abbot, all in white raiment and kneeling before an unseen altar, is excellent German work. The landscape with distant towers, seen through the pillars of an arcade behind would look better than it does, if it were not for the floating cherubs who hover in the spaces, and support two armorial shields. The border is a close imitation of the late Flemish style. On a yellow ground, lighted with twining gold branchlets, cut flowers are vividly painted, along with figures of a bee, a fox, a bird, a rabbit, and a hybrid animal like an ape.

{94}INDEX.

Aachen, metropolis of the Frankish Empire, 44 Abyssinia, writing in, 12,13 Abyssinian MS. Life of the Virgin, 85 Adamnan (St.), 28, 36 Adoration of the Magi, a miniature, 92 Ai-gupt, Semitic name of the Delta, 8 Akkadian writing, 7, 9 Alcuin at Tours and Aachen, 44 Amber-trade, 29 Ambrosian use in the Milanese liturgy, 53 Angles civilized, 34 Anglo-Saxon alphabet, 26, 32 -- decoration of MS., 35, 37 Antiphonale, 54 Apocalypse MSS., 73, 89 Apocalyptic designs, English work, 87 Arabian writing (Arabic), 20 Arabian (South) writing, 12 Arabic language, 21 -- writing, 20, 84 Aragonese Kings of Naples, 80 Aramæan Chaldees, 11, 12 Ascension, Pictures of the, 86 Asoka's Rock-inscriptions, 18 Assyrian Empire formed, 10 Assyriology, 6 Attavante, work done by, 81, 82

Babylonian monarchies, 7, 9, 10 Bactrian Kingdom, 18 Barbarians, movements of the, 42 Baroccio (Federico), 93 Bastaruæ, a Gothic people, 29 Bede, the Venerable, 34, 37 Bentivoglio (Giovanni), Prayer book, 92 Berossus, Assyrian Chronicle, 6 Bible, its influence on writing, 23 -- multiplied by scribes, 52 -- Greek, 24 {95} -- Syriac, 24 -- Hebrew, 24 -- Latin MSS., 87 Bologna school of law, 57 Book (origin of the word), 2 Borders in MSS., 62, 65, 71, 76 Boustrophedon writing, 16 Brégilles Livre d'Heures, 75 Breviary, foundation of the, 53 -- constitution of the, 67 -- MS. written at Ottenbeuern, 86 Britain Celtiberian, 27 -- Gallic, 27 -- Latin, 27 -- English, 27 British Isles, age of writing in, 27 Bruges MSS., 81, 91 Burgundian school of art, 65, 74, 91 Burmese writing, 21 Byzantine ornamentation, 25 -- Art not Hellenic, 47