Dotted red lines were used round the edge of large letters. These patterns were sometimes interwoven with animals, and terminations in heads of serpents, or birds. The Irish school of Illumination has a distinct lettering style, with a particular design and execution, marked by extreme intricacy of pattern, and interlacings of knots in a diagonal or square form. They could be composed of human figures, animals, birds, fish, or flowers. The initial letters of early manuscripts were not distinguished in size from the rest of the text, which was written in capitals, and the color scheme was simpler than the one used at the end of the 7th century.įrom the 7th to the 11th century, at the beginning of books and chapters, the initial letters are of a larger size. In the Byzantine Empire, the usage of writing whole pages in gold continued to its latest period. This time, however, a different technique was used, the gilding being applied in leaves, not in a liquid state. Writing in gold was less used in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, but came again into favour in the 14th, particularly in devotional books of high rank persons. Illuminated lettering of gold on white vellum is chiefly confined to the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries. Manuscripts illuminated throughout are hard to find, the artist decorating mostly the title, preface, or canon of the mass. In the 8th and 9th centuries, the colour, be it purple, violet, or rose, is no longer as bright and beautiful as in the preceding centuries. The taste for gold and purple illuminated letters reached England at the close of the 7th century, when Wilfred, Archbishop of York, enriched his church with a copy of the Gospels. In English, "drollerie" was also a term in the 18th century for genre paintings of low-life subjects, especially those in Dutch Golden Age painting, which indeed are to some extent descended from the medieval marginal images.The process of laying and burnishing gold and silver is old, and was enhanced in the Byzantine Empire by writing with such letters on vellum, stained in purple or rose color. Such images are the most plentiful sources of contemporary illustrations of ordinary life in the period, and many are often seen reproduced in modern books. The images mix sacred subjects relevant to the text with secular ones that are not. In the Taymouth Hours the images are inside the main frame given each page, and so are strictly bas de page images rather than being "marginal". The Taymouth Hours, Gorleston Psalter, and Smithfield Decretals are other examples all four are 14th-century and now in the British Library. This comes from the East Anglian school of illumination, which was especially fond of adding drolleries. Another manuscript that contains many drolleries is the English Luttrell Psalter, which has hybrid creatures and other monsters on a great deal of the pages. One manuscript, The Croy Hours, has so many it has become known as The Book of Drolleries. The word comes from the French drôlerie, meaning a joke. Often they have a thematic connection with the subject of the text of the page, and larger miniatures, and they usually form part of a wider scheme of decorated margins, though some are effectively doodles added later. Examples include cocks with human heads, dogs carrying human masks, archers winding out of a fish's mouth, bird-like dragons with an elephant's head on the back. The most common types of drollery images appear as mixed creatures, either between different animals, or between animals and human beings, or even between animals and plants or inorganic things. Decorative image in the margin of an illuminated manuscript Drollery detail from the Hours of Charles the Noble Page from the 14th-century Luttrell Psalter, showing two drolleries in the right margin.Ī drollerie, often also called a grotesque, is a small decorative image in the margin of an illuminated manuscript, most popular from about 1250 through the 15th century, though found earlier and later.
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