Chapter III: Part 3

Things were not dissimilar in Byzantium. The Liturgy there was even more complex and extensive than in the West, and the foolish literature of old Hellas was generally ignored by the men who were engaged in daily study of the Euchologium, the Horologium, the Menologium, the Archieraticon, the Synaxarium, the Octoechos, &c. The Bibliotheca of Photius shows, however, that the race of students who cultivated the old literature was not wholly extinct.

At all times, both in the East and the West, the letters and charters of Kings, and diplomatic documents of every {55}kind, needed the service of trained penmen. This department of graphic labour was not completely in the hands of churchmen; and it led to the creation of a caste of writers in every country who were not under the influence of the monkish schools. They could not afford to spend so much time as the book writers over their work, and thus a hand of cursive character was established in every chancellery in Europe, devoted only to the service of the State and never employed for any other purpose. It was nearly always ugly, sometimes fantastic, sometimes difficult to be read except by the officials engaged in such work. From the earliest days of diplomatic writing, in the sixth century in Italy, down to the seventeenth century in England, it preserved a strange and fanciful style, first long, thin and narrow letters looking like a congeries of wandering parallel lines indistinguishable without a glass, and finally letters of proper size, but so disguised in shape as to be indecipherable without a special training. At only one period, that is, in the late eleventh and in the twelfth century, was diplomatic writing fair and readable. That was in England and Northern France; but even here, the upright strokes of letters like l, and d, and b, were elongated to an enormous extent, and in their sweep offered to the scribe his few opportunities of ornamentation. As our business, however, is with books we leave the charters and the rescripts on one side, and proceed to the consideration of the main character of the calligrapher's work.

The Bible and the Liturgy for churchmen have been spoken of as the chief objects of reproduction among the scribes for many centuries. It was not till the twelfth century that their labours required to be augmented for the service of laymen. Men (and women) who could afford the expense, or whose position demanded that they should have prayerbooks for their own use, whether they could read ill or well or not at all, were furnished with Latin Psalters, to which were added, at the end, the Athanasian {56}Creed, a Litany of Saints, some general prayers, and the office for the Dead. They were extracts from the Breviary for the use of persons who only prayed occasionally. The growth of something like education, and a religious desire to share to a somewhat greater extent the communion with Heaven which was monopolised by monks and priests, caused a further extension of calligraphic labour towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Psalter with its scanty additions was no longer sufficient for pious laymen. A larger selection of prayers and lessons from the Breviary was concocted; the offices of the Virgin, of the Cross, of the Holy Ghost, and of some special saints were united to form the Book of Hours. It was nothing like the severe and frequent task of orisons with which the monks performed their duties at the canonical Hours of the day and night, but it was sufficient for the most zealous laymen and laywomen; and it became the private Prayerbook of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. During that period it was produced in countless thousands of manuscripts in England, France, Flanders, Italy, and to a less extent in Germany and Spain. In England it was called Horæ Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, or Book of Hours, or Primer; in France always Horæ, or Livre d'Heures; in Italy it was Officium B.V.M., and in Flanders and Holland Ghetijden. The Gebetbuch of Germany belongs chiefly to the fifteenth century, and was nearly always in German, while in France, Flanders, and England, prayers in the vernacular only crept in gradually here and there. (In Italy the book always continued to be written in Latin only.) In the English Hours or Primer the vernacular portions became at last so important that it was found advisable to issue many of the printed Primers in the sixteenth century in bilingual form, Latin and English; and it was undoubtedly this tendency both in England and in Germany which produced the Reformation. It was not so much the desire for a Reformation of the Church--even Boccaccio, himself a churchman, {57}and many others of his kind had wished for _that_--as an invincible demand for a vernacular liturgy, which widened through opposition into an eagerness to sweep away everything that opposed it. Hence the break with Rome, which still imperiously demanded the uniformity that could only be maintained by the use of a single language throughout Europe. The few exceptions to the rule which ecclesiastical policy had ever allowed were in the concession to the affiliated Greek, Slavonic, and Oriental congregations of a right to use their own vernacular liturgies. The antiquity of the Greek and Syriac formulas, on the one hand, the utter impossibility of making Latin familiar even to the priests of the Slavic and Oriental churches, and the certainty that a denial of their needs would throw them into the Byzantine fold--account for Papal acquiescence in that respect. But the Popes could not see that England and Germany, which had from so early a time been the seats of Roman colonies and the homes of Latin churches, likewise needed a liturgy that the people could understand; and that the Teutonic speech of the north had no such generic sympathy with the language of the Roman liturgy as the rustic Latin tongues of Italy, Spain, and France.

The Canon Law, deriving from the remains of the apostolical constitutions and the acts of the Councils, the Penitentiaries which had been formulated by bishops for the government of Christianised barbarians, and the decrees of Popes, began to take shape as a Code in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The existence of forged documents among the decretals was a matter of no great importance. Everything was sufficiently old to be respectable; and the schools of law, which had never given up the study and cultivation of the Civil Code (digested in Justinian's time from the various works of the old Roman jurists), set to work to arrange and gloss the Canon Law. The two Codes, especially the Ecclesiastical, provided the scribes of Western Europe with an enormous amount of work. Bologna, {58}Padua, Paris, and Oxford were renowned for their lawyers and their schools of law; with the accompanying armies of students and copyists.

Christian poets, too, were not lacking. From the time of Lactantius onwards, the quantity of metrical Latin work done by churchmen was very large; and the lyrical yearning inherent in all societies had produced an immense hymnology, which comprised a great deal of real poetry--most poetical and most charming when least Ciceronian. Here, again, was rich material for the copyists of the scriptorium; and both Hymnals and Lawbooks lent their aid towards the gradual tendency of students to go back and investigate the ancient sources of literature and philosophy and history. Pliny had never been wholly forgotten, even in the most anti-pagan times, and the treatises on natural science which had appeared among the schoolmen, all stimulated curiosity to learn what had been written before the days of Constantine. The result of these intellectual tendencies made the fourteenth century a dawn of the Renaissance, and with the beginning of the fifteenth a large body of heathen literature was annexed to the libraries of universities, scholars, and monasteries, giving increased employment to the transcribers who were at that time busy all over Europe. It was in the thirteenth century that the monks and the priests lost their monopoly of the practice of ornamental writing; in the fourteenth century every great city had its ateliers of calligraphers unconnected with the Church; and when the fifteenth century arrived the trained citizen penmen, who formed crafts throughout Europe, were probably not inferior in number to the scribes who worked in ecclesiastical edifices.

_The Illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages_

This division of our matter is the largest, and is also the most interesting to the majority of students and {59}collectors. In beginning it, some repetition will be necessary in order to bring the subject as a whole before the reader.

Between the ninth century and the sixteenth, the multiplication of MSS. in Europe was very great, but comparatively few of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh have been preserved. Beautiful examples of blended writing and decoration were produced in England in the ninth century by Anglian and Irish calligraphers in the north, and by Saxon writers in the south. In York and Durham, and Lindisfarne, the style and the motifs of ornament were still thoroughly Irish; in the south, although the late Roman had conquered the Celtic, their collision had produced a singularly fine type of illumination, reminiscent of Byzantine work, but much more free and natural. That art had already beautified the Carolingian French school; in the Carolingian German its influence appears in a weaker and ruder form. When with the tenth century France and Germany emerged as two distinct nations from the chaos of the Frankish empire, their modes of book-decoration began to diverge. The rudeness of an earlier time remains, with a good deal of spirit, in the illustrative designs produced in Germany; the beauty of French work began to decay, while the English was at its best. Winchester, Canterbury, and Glastonbury were the real centres of English art at the middle of the tenth century; the Norsemen having destroyed the Anglo-Irish monasteries in the north. This south English school is considered to have benefited materially by the technical superiority of French methods. What the north English schools of York and Lindisfarne had given to Tours in the eighth century, came back to Winchester at the end of the ninth, refined and embellished. Thus the supremacy of English art was assured at a time when French art was declining. The great variety, however, in all countries, of work done by different men, renders it difficult to draw general deductions. The calligraphic decoration of "Visigothic" and "Lombardic" manuscripts during the ninth, {60}tenth, and eleventh centuries is visibly Celtic in origin and style. Their pictorial illustration is sometimes very striking, and indicates the existence of several central schools of design in Europe. The English, the French, the German, the Spanish, and the Italian, had all certain qualities in common, but the first two were most nearly akin. The other three schools produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries books containing pictures, in which the composition is more remarkable than the drawing, and the painting is full of barbaric contrasts of colour. At all times, fine work was to be found in Italy, but only in isolated examples, and Italy as a whole underwent the same barbarisation as the other countries. From that stage the English and the French were the first to emerge. They can hardly be said to have _revived_ any former state of art in connexion with books. It was with them a real creation. The frequent reference to Byzantium as having supplied the models for European illuminated work is misleading. The first sign of actual contact with Byzantium is in the early part of the ninth century, when certain pictures produced in Carolingian MSS. show that the painters had been made aware of the existence of similar Byzantine work. And that is actually all that can be referred to as direct imitation of Byzantine art. The magnificent early examples of chrysography on purple vellum were not Byzantine but Eastern-Roman, and the Roman traditions of the Eastern capital lingered on into the ninth century, having begun to grow weaker at the end of the sixth. Italy was nearer and more potent in its influence upon barbaric art than Byzantium, and there was little difference in book-decoration between East Rome and West Rome till after the time of Justinian; so far as the cultivation of the arts was concerned. Consequently there is no need to look to Byzantium as having supplied models for the rest of Europe to follow. There is a difference of kind, not merely of degree, between the _livres de luxe_ of the two Roman empires, and those of the new nations which began {61}with Irish work about A.D. 600, and ended with Italian and French work about 1550. The former were books written in gold, perhaps; perhaps decorated with red ink only; illustrated, maybe, with a picture or with pictures. The latter were books of which the principal characteristic was not their bookishness but their decorativeness. A set scheme of ornament sustained from beginning to end, with due proportion in the intervals, in which even the pictorial designs were subordinate to the decorative plan, constituted the value of the illuminated books of the European middle ages.

Bibles and liturgical books in the twelfth century are remarkable for their large size and the quantity of decoration with which they were produced. In Germany, the method of ornament still repeats the Anglo-Saxon type derived from Carolingian work, and the handwriting is still Carolingian, but the letters lean forward instead of being upright, their forms are narrowed and chiselled off by short sharp terminal strokes that give an appearance of angularity. (An example of the art is given on plate 21.) In Spain, the beautiful round "Visigothic" letters are still retained, with large initials of interlaced Celtic pattern, and the illustrative pictures (if there are any) have the same style as had been developed some centuries earlier in Aquitaine. The German and the Spanish have a sort of resemblance by reason of their common origin, but more especially because of the striking combination of green and yellow in the paintings, the note of yellow apparently being strongest in the latter, and of green in the former. The use of green tints predominates likewise in English work of the eighth-twelfth centuries, but became much more sparing under the influence of the French school which, after the eleventh century, began to avoid indulgence in that colour. It never lost its favourite place in German art, and the MSS. of Holland and Flanders only dropped it when they began to assimilate French methods in the fourteenth century. England in the twelfth century {62}produced much finer work than the French. In fact the English school of that century was the parent of nearly all the art of the following century. Both in calligraphy and in pictorial designs, it forestalled the work done in the whole of Western Europe between 1200 and 1300, which has rendered the thirteenth century the most noteworthy in the history of illustrated MSS. The mode and style of drawing, unfinished by illumination, which were practised in England towards the close of the thirteenth century, may be examined in plate 10. Italian work of the same time is shown in plate 11 to have been much more barbaric and unskilful. The difference between English twelfth-century work and that of Europe in the thirteenth century consisted in the large and ample freedom of hand which marks the former and the delicate minuteness which characterises alike the writing and the miniatures of the latter. As for style and quality of work, there is scarcely any difference between them. This new English school, so admirable in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had grown up over the decline of the Anglo-Saxon phase, which, fine as it was, had still somewhat of a barbaric air about it. The conquest of the Saxon monarchy by a Duke of Normandy in the eleventh century, and the succession in the twelfth of a Count of Anjou who united under his sceptre England, Normandy, and Aquitaine, made this country the centre of French art and literature for a considerable period. Hence the almost complete identity of the modes of writing and ornamentation between English and French work in the thirteenth century. In Central and South-eastern France the style varied somewhat as will be seen by comparing the examples given on plates 8 and 9. There is no school of art more interesting than the Anglo-Norman, as it is called, of that time. The illuminated border had not yet established itself, but the initials, drawn upon a ground of burnished gold or of diapered tints, enclose painted miniatures looking like very fine pen-and-ink designs carefully coloured. Bibles thus decorated are very {63}numerous. As they approach the end of the century, they exhibit now and then long straight lines, ending in curves or fleurons, which spread from the pictured initial upwards and downwards, and form a simple border to more than half the page. This incipient practice increased gradually from the beginning of the following century onwards. The fleurons became gold ivy-leaves, and similar leaves were figured as sprouting out from the long straight border-lines, these lines being extended so as to enclose the page on all sides. Still the effect was stiff and imperfect, but by the close of the fourteenth century, a very splendid kind of foliated border was used by French illuminators. The gold leaves called ivy-leaves were now introduced in greater number and made to sprout, no longer from the straight border frame itself, but more naturally out of branches which festooned from the frame. The ivy-leaf border in this state was very much favoured in French illumination, but was little used elsewhere. It generally accompanies pictorial illustration of superior merit, and gives an air of distinction and elegance to any MS. in which it is found. The French schools of Central France and of Paris had by the middle of the fourteenth century regained their lost pre-eminence in art.

The thirteenth century was the first and the finest period of mediæval "gothic," so far as handwriting is concerned. (The name is a misnomer, but has a clear recognised sense, and is useful.) The letters are angulated at their extremities, but the bodies are still rounded and perfectly clear. The square and lapidar Gothic was introduced in the fourteenth century, and prevailed during that and the two succeeding centuries. It was a vicious script, indistinct and difficult to read; and although some examples, distinct, legible, and handsome, were brought out in the fifteenth century, the system was generally bad, and there is no reason to regret its extinction, which took place in France, Italy, and Spain about the middle of the sixteenth {64}century, and in England somewhat later, although it is lingering on even now in Germany and Denmark.

The square Gothic of the fourteenth century, however unclear and objectionable as a script, was not ill adapted to ornamental purposes, as the vast number of prayerbooks for the laity produced between 1350 and 1400, and throughout the succeeding century, make manifest. Of those prayerbooks, which for a hundred and fifty years were the chief medium for displaying the skill of the mediæval illuminator, the number of copies which were made for individuals or families, as birth-day or wedding gifts, or for whatever reason, was incredibly large. The existence of such prayerbooks, well written and decorated with paintings, for private persons, is enough in itself to show that the office of calligrapher and miniaturist was a secular trade, and that the "old monks," to whom so many persons ascribe the writing of the "missals," had long ceased to be the sole producers of MSS.

Not many of the earlier Books of Hours have survived, that is, of those which were written between 1300 and 1350; but from the latter date onwards to 1400 they are not uncommon, and from 1400 onwards very numerous. This statement refers to French and Franco-Flemish and Burgundian work. Of English work, there are very few extant anterior to 1400, and the same may be said of Dutch examples. As for those written in Italy and Germany, it is only towards the close of the fifteenth century that they are met with. The English and French Hours produced during 1350-1420 are very different in their mode of ornamentation. The Gothic writing was pretty nearly the same everywhere, and the larger illuminated initials had followed one model since the thirteenth century. These initials (when not historiated with little miniatures) were painted in colour upon a ground usually of gold. The space within the letter-forms was filled up with a conventional flower-pattern, having buds of red and blue tints. At the earlier {65}period the letter-form has a small extension upwards and downwards, in a simple style resembling wood-carving. In the fourteenth century this extension is increased, and the long straight border, with ivy-leaves here and there, was produced. While that kind of border was in France being developed into its most elegant phase, a different type was preferred in England. The gold ground of the initial is prolonged into a stem, around which twines a corresponding prolongation of coloured foliage springing from the curved extremities of the initial letter. Thus they form a border which would be pretty enough in itself, but which is further decorated with tufts of long feathery grass, tipped with buds, which grow out of the stem and sweep in graceful curves outside the line of foliage. This feathery ornament--which, except for the little fleurons in colour here and there, seems drawn with a fine pen in brown ink--is distinctly English, and was retained till late in the fifteenth century, side by side with newer methods borrowed from France. The red and blue, with white lights, which are used in the initials and capitals by the French illuminators, are in the English MSS. pink and pale blue, and the white lights are broader.

As soon as the ivy-leaf pattern, with its brilliant gold points, began to go out of fashion in France, a new kind of border came into vogue. The conventional red and blue foliage still continued to spring out from the initials and at intervals below and above; all the intervening space was filled in with curling and twining tendrils, drawn with a pen or a very fine brush, forming a kind of hedge, in the midst of which were scattered here and there little natural flowers and fruits, growing out of the curled tendrils. This was in use in French and Burgundian and Flemish MSS. from about 1420-30 onwards, and became a favourite method of decoration in England towards the middle of the century. At that time, and in that style, prayerbooks done in the three countries are often much alike, and it is {66}only the painting of the miniatures and the differences in the calendar and litany which distinguish them.

_The chief Liturgical Books distinguished_

A word may be said here as to the means of distinguishing the liturgical MSS., and obtaining an idea of their place of origin. It ought not to be necessary, but, as a matter of fact, there are many persons of fair education, and possessing no inconsiderable familiarity with manuscripts, who call every Book of Hours a "Missal," and who cannot distinguish between a Breviary and a Missal.

The Missal gives the service of the Mass for the whole year. Its essence lies in the Canon of the Mass, beginning with the words "Te igitur," which is preceded by a number of præfationes (some of them general, some of them appropriated to special occasions), and followed by the Communion and the concluding thanksgivings. This was in more ancient times the first and the larger part of the Mass-book, and was followed by a set of prayers, which in the service itself preceded and led to the Preface, these preliminary prayers being arranged under the festivals of the year from December to December. In the Missal, as arranged and enlarged in the thirteenth century, there are four divisions: 1. De Tempore (Sundays and festivals); 2. Prefaces, Canon, and Ordinary of the Mass; 3. Mass-prayers appropriated to special Saints' days; 4. Mass-prayers common to all Saints' days. The chronological order from Advent to Advent (30th November to 29th November) was followed, except in the case of some of the most solemn and ancient commemorations, and also of some special festivals that had been appointed after the original compilement of the Mass-book. These were incorporated in the part De Tempore, in succession to the text relating to the Advent. At the end of the fourth part were also added some of the special offices in regard to the laity, which had to be {67}performed by the priest, such as matrimony, baptism, and burial.

The essence of the Breviary was the Psalter, which formed the groundwork of all the forms of devotion used at the Canonical Hours. With the appointed extracts from the Psalter a number of prayers were used, and these were divided in exactly the same way as those of the Missal into Temporal (of Sundays and festivals) in one sequence; and Sanctoral, in two sections, Proper and Common. The perpetually recurring rubrics of Matins, Lauds, Prime, Tierce, Sext, None, and Vespers (ad matutinas, in laudibus, ad primam, ad tertiam, ad sextam, ad nonam, ad vesperas) mark the hours of their use from midnight to midnight. These headings, repeated from day to day all over the year, ought to be sufficient even to the least observant eye to indicate the Breviary. It also contains at the end the offices of Marriage, Baptism, Burial, &c.; and in some of the Breviaries the office of the Mass itself (not the whole Missal) is included.

The Book of Hours (or Private Prayerbook) is a selection from the Breviary, and is likewise marked with the rubrics of the hours (Matins, Lauds, Nones, &c.), but they are applied only to the offices selected, and do not contain the chronological divisions, Temporal and Sanctoral, for the year. The offices are usually those of the Virgin, of the Cross, of the Holy Ghost, of the Trinity, and these, with the Office for the Dead, and commemorations of some special Saints, form the chief bulk of the Horæ.

The Calendar, which is found at the beginning, and the Litany (or Litanies) of Saints, which is found in the body, of each of the three books, are usually the most obvious sources of information with regard to the origin of the manuscript. If the _use_, or diocesan form of the liturgy, is purely Roman, as is sometimes the case even in books written in France, Flanders, and England, then the search is frustrated. It happens, however, frequently that even {68}the Roman Calendar and the Roman Litany are enlarged by the addition of names to which a special local veneration was paid, and then one is able to discover hints of origin which may indicate either a country or a diocese. In the French books, the number of French Saints is usually considerable, that is of French Saints who do not appear in the Roman calendar, but they are generally gathered impartially from all the dioceses. It is only when we find that a single diocese furnishes the names of two or three canonised bishops, or when a name appears in gold in the calendar which had no special importance for the whole of the country, but must have had a particular interest in one city or diocese, that we can begin to think of special attributions. Thus, if St. Ives (Yvo), Ste. Genevieve, St. Germain, St. Leufroy, St. Louis, S. Faro, St. Ursin, St. Saintin, St. Saturnin, Ste. Radegonde, St. Fiacre, St. Austrebert, and many others, are found in the Calendar, and any of them in the Litany, it is a sure proof of French origin. If St. Saturnin appears in gold in the Calendar, it serves to indicate Toulouse; if St. Sainctin, Meaux; Martial, Limoges; Firmin, Metz or Amiens; and if SS. Ursin, Guillaume, and Austregisile occur together in the Litany, they point out Bourges--all three having been Archbishops of that see. But in all cases collateral or cumulative testimony is required.

Saints Vedastus and Amandus (Vaast and Amand), although belonging to Flanders, may occur either in French or Flemish Calendars; but when they are combined with Bavo and Bertin, and Quintin and Aldegund, they indicate Ghent or its vicinity as the place of origin. St. Piat, St. Lehyre (or Eleutherius), and St. Guillain point to Tournay. St. Valery or Walery (Walaricus) is another Flemish Saint, as also are Audomar, Gaugericus, Godeleve, Winnoc, and Amelberga. As for MSS. of Flemish origin, it must be remembered that the word Flemish is loosely used to designate all portions of the Low Countries except the {69}purely Dutch provinces, and that Artois and Picardy and other portions of the French _Pays Reconquis_ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were part of them. In the same way Franche Comté and the Duchies of Burgundy and Lorraine were also outside of France in the fifteenth century; and Languedoc and Provence and Dauphiné were late additions to the French monarchy. The words Flemish (in its fullest sense) and French have therefore to be used with caution. Even Brittany was only incorporated at the end of the fifteenth century.

Manuscript liturgies of English origin of any date are unmistakable by reason of the saints' names. St. Thomas a Becket is _not_ one of the distinctive ones, for he was worshipped everywhere; but all the English books, whether they be of Roman use, or of Salisbury or York use, contain the names of SS. Alban, Cuthbert, Aldhelm, Guthlac, Botulph, Grimbald, Edward, Richard, Edmund, Swithin, Dunstan, Etheldreda, Edith, Winifrid, Chad, John of Beverley. The names of St. Wilfrid, St. William, St. Hilda, St. Aidan, St. Bede, and St. Everilda, are proofs of York and northern use; St. Milburga, St. Guthlac, and St. Thomas Cantilupe indicated Hereford, as also does St. Osytha, although one name alone is not sufficient. St. Wulfstan points to Worcester, St. Hugh to Lincoln, but not always. Aldatus, Kinburga, Egwin, and Elwin, are only found in books of Gloucester or western origin. St. Erkenwald always indicates London or the south.

Scottish liturgies of the kind are very rare, and contain the names of saints not elsewhere met with. There can be no doubt as to the origin beyond the border of a book which either in its calendar or its Litany gives the names of Kentigern, Ninian, Aidan, Adamnan, Monan, Queen Margaret, Duthac, and Modoc. Even any one of these names is sufficient, although Adamnan, Aidan, and Ninian might possibly appear on this side of the Tweed, as well as St. Adrian who was likewise Scottish.

{70}Special German saints are Gotthard, Lambert (not always), Adelbert, Bernward, Sebald, Swibert, Cunegund, Hermenegild, Willibald, Kilian, Hedwig, Wolfgang, Irmin.

Among the saints of the Spanish calendar are Isidore, Ildefonsus, Eulalia, Raimund, Leocadia, Gumersind, Baldomer, Leander, Braulio, Turibius, Quiteria, Froilan. There is sometimes a curious coincidence between the Spanish and the German calendars. The Spanish coincidences with the calendar of Southern France are more easily to be accounted for.

The Italian saints are always those of the Roman calendar, but St. Zenobio is seldom found outside of Tuscany. SS. Bernardinus of Siena and Nicolas of Tolentinum are Italian saints of the fifteenth century more frequently found in Italian calendars (after 1450) than in calendars of other countries. In the case of the latter two, their names are sometimes useful in fixing a limit for the age of a book, because MSS. of the time of their canonisation are numerous. The dates of beatification of some earlier saints such as Thomas Becket, Francis, Dominic, and King Louis, are also occasionally of service; but as a rule the names of the saints in the calendars are far older than the thirteenth century.

_The Fourteenth Century in Italy and Germany_

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.