A page from Lindisfarne Gospels, circa 715 AD. The Lindisfarne Gospels are attributed to be the work of a monk named Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, who later became Bishop of Lindisfarne and died in 721. (3) It is believed the gospels were produced in honour of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. These incorporates highly decorated illustrations in a detached form, and were originally encased in a fine leather binding covered with jewels and metals made by Billfrith the Anchorite in the 8th century. However, during the Viking raids on Lindisfarne the original cover was lost, and a replacement made in 1852.(4)
By Guity Novin / 03.23.2014
Graphic Designer, Artist
Throughout their histories a symbiotic relationship has existed between the book and graphic design. The modern form of the book which appeared around the second century AD is called the codex. These had a number of detached leaves or pages secured between protective covers. The writing surface of the early illustrated codices were either papyrus or parchments made from animal skins. Gradually in Europe and the Middle East, parchments replaced papyrus for production of the codex and remained the preferred media in Europe for the next 800 years when the mass production of paper gradually replaced them.
Paper which was invented in China around 105 AD, was at first prepared from bark and hemp. These were not quite suitable for drawing and decoration. Although, paper produced by the Chinese technology was of a high standard. This technology was transferred to Japan around 610 AD, and then to the Arab world via Samarkand in Central Asia. In America, the Aztec and Mayan civilizations also produced a more primitive bark paper from an unknown date.
In Europe paper was introduced by Arab traders of Spain. Italy was the first European country that produced paper around 1276 AD, and more than two and half centuries later England began to produce it in 1495. The primary reason for this slow pace was the low quality of these papers which were unsuited for graphic design of European religious manuscripts.1 Among these early European manuscripts are the Bibles that have been created in the monasteries of Ireland, Scotland, and England. Many of graphic decorations in these books have been influenced by the Arabesque style of Muslim manuscripts that employed mainly geometrical and abstract designs for decorating their holy books and their mosques.
The Court School of Charlemagne (also known as the Ada School) produced the earliest manuscripts, including the Ada Gospels. The Ada Gospels is a late eighth century or early ninth century Carolingian Gospel Book. The manuscript contains a dedication to Charlemagne’s sister Ada, whence it gets its name.The Court School manuscripts were ornate, elegant, dramatic, and evocative of 6th century ivories and mosaics from Ravenna, Italy.
In the early 9th century Archbishop Ebo of Rheims, at Hautvillers (near Rheims), assembled artists and transformed Carolingian art to something which evoked a revival of Roman classicism. However, it still kept its characteristics of basically linear presentation, with no concern for volume and spatial relationships. The style was reminiscent of the Merovingian and Hiberno-Saxon traditions known as the art of the Migration Period . The Gospels were painted with energetic, bright and vivid brush strokes, evoking an inspiration and energy unknown in classical Mediterranean forms. (5)
The Book of Kells is the most famous, and one of the finest, of a group of manuscripts in what is known as the Insular style, produced from the late 6th through the early 9th centuries in the British monasteries (6). The graphic decorations are all high quality and often very complex. In one decoration, which occupies a one-inch square piece of a page, there are 158 complex interlaces of white ribbon with a black border on either side.
Such designs are scattered throughout the text with decorated initials and small figures of animals and humans often twisted and tied into complicated knots and many of them serve to fill spaces left at the end of lines. Many significant texts, such as the Pater Noster have decorated initials. No earlier surviving manuscript has this massive amount of decoration.
The Book of Durrow, a 7th-century illuminated manuscript made either at Durrow Abbey in Ireland, or in Northumbria in Northern England has a complex graphic design. There is a sense of space in the layout of all its pages. Open vellum balances intensely decorated areas. Animal interlace of very high quality appears on some folios . Other motifs include spirals, triskeles, ribbon plaits and circular knots in the carpet pages and borders around the Evangelists.
The first letter of the text is enlarged and decorated, with the following letters surrounded by dots. The monks who endowed the Book of Durrow with their calligraphic art and decorative designwork can be regarded as being among the earliest Irish artists of the medieval period. The Gospel manuscript itself exemplifies the style known as Hiberno-Saxon or Ultimate La Tene, which was widely practised across the British Isles and Ireland. (7)
Commentary on the Apocalypse, Adam and Eve, Original Sin. This commentary was popular during the Middle Ages and survives in over 30 manuscripts (usually called Beatus) from the 10th through the 13th century, published in 776 by Beatus of Liebana (730 -798, Spanish monk and theologian). Royal Library, El Escorial, Spain.
The surviving European illuminated manuscripts, particularly those of Ireland and Italy that are created by mostly monastic scribes of late antiquity, with their decorated initials, borders and miniatures constitute the inception of the modern graphic design.
Scriptoria were workshops devoted to the hand-lettered copying of manuscripts. A scriptorium was most often an extension of a library for the professional scribes to copy manuscripts. The scribes were working under the direction of an armarius or a scrittori, who acted as an art director. He was director of a monastic scriptorium, who provided the scribes with their materials and ensured the quality of the process. Decorations and illuminations were added by other resident artists.
The Holkham Bible Picture Book. The creation of the animals. The Creator among his animals. There are seven kinds of trees, with the vine emerging from God’s halo.The animals include a lion, elephant, and unicorn. The birds are carefully studied; some are shown flying, some like the owl perch on trees, and others by the water. There are two fishes, apparently pike. England; C. 1320-1330. The British Library, London, Great Britain
Illuminated manuscripts are classified according to their historic periods and types, such as
Insular script: a script characterized by thick initial strokes and heavy shading developed from half uncial under the influence of uncial by Irish scribes about the 5th and 6th centuries a.d. and used in England until the Norman conquest and in Ireland with modifications to the present day.
The Book of Kells, Ireland, A.D. 800
The Book of Durrow, Ireland, 7th century
The Codex Aureus, England, 9th century
Merovingian script: is the writing of the pre-Carolingian hands of France that were derived from Latin cursive script. Luxeuil, in Burgundy, was a particularly important centre in the development of a Merovingian cursive style during the 7th and 8th centuries. The style of script that developed in northern France at the monastery of Corbie, a daughter house of Luxeuil, is especially noteworthy for the influence of half-uncial and uncial. Merovingian writing is interesting to paleographers because of the part it had in shaping the black-letter script that was prevalent in the Middle Ages. Like Visigothic script, the Merovingian hands inherited the dominant vertical rhythm of the Latin cursive script of the ancient Romans. Angularity as a prevailing tendency and an effect of lateral crowding, especially in the first lines of a Merovingian manuscript, led to the use of the term picket- fence style by some 20th-century scholars of calligraphy.
Folio 144 of the Lectionary of Luxeuil, manuscript Lat. 9427, at the National Library of France, written in the Luxeuil type. The folio’s content consists of Acts 5:17-25.
The illuminations, miniatures and historiated initials represent a high point of late Merovingian book art and the script represents an excellent example of early Carolingian minuscule. It is, as Bischoff states: “A demonstration of what richness in initial forms and motifs a virtuoso and imaginatively inspired late-eighth-century miniaturist could employ…”
The Roman scripts of the fourth century evolved over the next several hundred years into many different regional styles, e.g.: Roman cursive minuscule became Insular Majuscule in Ireland and England, or Merovingian and Luxeuil minuscules in France, or Lombardic and Beneventan minuscules in Southern Italy, or Visigothic minuscule in Spain, or Germanic minuscule in Germany, etc. The point is that by the eight century the situation was a mess5 and this, not surprisingly, proved rather problematic for Charlemagne’s administration of his Frankish empire. To rectify this situation Charlemagne, in his 789 Admonitio Generalis, set new standards for copying texts, including the adoption of a new more uniform and more legible script to replace the various, and often nearly illegible, regional styles. This script, Carolingian (or Caroline) minuscule, was based on the Merovingian and Germanic scripts and the Roman half-uncials and featured an uncial d, a modern a and g, and clubbed ascenders.
Carolingian manuscripts: These manuscripts were mainly created by clerics in a few workshops around the Carolingian Empire. Each of these workshops practiced its own style that developed based on the artists and influences of that particular location and time. As the earliest producer of Carolingian manuscripts, the Court School of Charlemagne initiated a revival of Roman classicism, yet still maintained Migration Period art (Merovingian and Insular) traditions in their linear presentation, with no concern for volume and spatial relationships. The Utrecht Psalter was perhaps the most important of all Carolingian manuscripts, because of its innovative and naturalistic figurine line drawings, which were to become the most influential innovation of Carolingian art on later periods.
Carolingian manuscripts, France, 7th to 10th centuries
Ottonian manuscripts: The finest achievements of Ottonian illumination are connnected with the patronage of Egbert, Archbishop of Trier (977-93), and the Imperial court. The origin of this interrelated series of illuminated manuscripts has long been connected with the Imperial monastery of Reichenau, believed to have been the seat of the chancellery of the Emperors, but it has been argued more recently that most of the manuscripts were produced at Trier. What is quite clear is that the scriptorium worked both for Egbert and for the Emperors Otto II (973-83), Otto III (996-1002), and even on until the reign of Henry II (1002-24), and that it should be seen first and foremost as an Imperial scriptorium. One of the manuscripts of this closely interrelated group of masterpieces of book illustration – a gospel lectionary which sets out the readings from the gospels throughout the liturgical year, known as the Egbert Codex.
Ottonian manuscripts, Germany, 10th and 11th centuries
Romanesque manuscripts:There are more illuminated manuscripts extant from the Romanesque period than from all earlier periods. It presented viewers with an energetic art which flourished in England, and migrated across the channel to France. Examples include,Gospels of Saint-Bertin by an English painter at Saint-Bertin, near Boulogne-sur-Mer on the Channel coast, at the end of the tenth century.” The human narrative style is matched by the sprightly drawing, the delicate and transparent colors, and the rippling drapery folds. Citeaux: The Romanesque manuscript style appeared in numerous forms, another possibility appearing in a highly imaginative illumination from the Moralia in Job of Saint Gregory, painted at the onset of the twelfth century of the Burgundia monastery of Citeaux. The Bible of Bury Saint Edmunds: Figures, border, ornament, architecture, and landscape, even the text, are treated equally in brilliant color, resulting in total master of surface design, and The Bayeux tapestry: an embroidery done on “eight bolts of natural colored linen with only two different stitches of wool; in tapestry, the design is woven along with the fabric.
The St.Albans Psalter, England, 12th century
Gothic manuscripts: Apparently, for a period of 40 years during the fourth century a Gothic Bishop, Wulfila, prepared a translation of almost all the Bible into the Gothic language. In order to accomplish this task he had had to invent letters. None of the original manuscripts has survived and the lion’s share of those texts we have nowadays is apparently from the sixth century. The best preserved manuscript is the so-called Codex Argenteus – the ‘Silver Book.’ In the great debate concerning the nature of God, which had flared up in the early Church, the Goths happened to be Arians. As it turned out, they were on the loosing side and as such, were destined to history’s dustbin. In practice, it meant that nobody studied or copied their writings and either by intentional destroying or simply by neglect, very little of their heritage has survived. The main reason why anybody would be interested in what was left extant from their legacy is its linguistic value; Gothic is the oldest Germanic language of which we have written evidence.
Gothic book pages from the 14th century. Second from left: The Fitz-Payne Book, second from right the Queen Mary Psalter.