More Dragons

#dragons#illuminedmanuscripts

MORE DRAGONS

Lets start with the famous Hartley Dragon  which is also an example of text boxs frames and breaking the frame !

A Dragon Slayer showing a generous usage of ultramarine blue 

from a few centuries later the story of Vortigern and the Dragons!

 and finally back to the carolingian era 

enjoy both the crisp clear lettering and the image of the dragon standard and note how over the centuries as styles changed the ratio and layout of text to image also changes ? 

More Gold - 2 Illumined Manuscripts

This is an illustration to the popular Middle French poem the Roman de la Rose 

The illuminator has restrained the gold to the background to emphasize the foreground blues and reds.

Western European artists were not the only people using gold though!

Here's an example of its use with an Arabic text!

Both cultures may have been inspired by the Byzantines also using gold.

Join me for more posts about gold!

A Flemish Book of Hours

Here's a double page from a Flemish Book of Hours that demonstrates several aspect of European culture in the Middle Ages:

ONE) Fantasy Illustration is not a recent innovation

TWO) Other scripts then "GOTHIC" were used.

THREE) Interaction of Illumined Manuscript and Techniques used for larger paintings
Note the use of shadows.

FOUR) Use of workshops there seems to be at three separate "hands" involved on these pages! Possibly four if the calligrapher wasn't one of the other artists.

Or just enjoy the images without analysing them!

Scribes as Apostles and vice versus.

There seems to have been a meme amongst Manuscript Illuminators of depicting St.Mark as a Scribe.

Here's a gallery of some of the images I've found so far

I do wonder if any of these were "selfies" by the scribe / illuminator ?

Book of Hours Three

Book of Hours Three

Gothic Scripts in context

Both of these pages are from books of Hours from French workshops.

The first one reminds of me of the earlier English styles from the Winchester school and the second has well I picked this one ot show the binding and covers.

Art books discussing illuminated manuscripts have a tendency to use photos that emphasize the illustrations over ones that give you an idea of their setting and context within the page unless the book is a modern reproduction of  a whole work.

The use of ornament as a frame to emphasize text is also something web and ebooks designers should consider.

How should we balance white space, text, and decoration, to make text both legible and lovely?