(
Cleveland,
Ohio, US)
Latin Europe Art historians classify illuminated manuscripts into their historic periods and types, including (but not limited to)
Late Antique,
Insular,
Carolingian,
Ottonian,
Romanesque,
Gothic, and
Renaissance manuscripts. There are a few examples from later periods. Books that are heavily and richly illuminated are sometimes known as "display books" in church contexts, or "luxury manuscripts", especially if secular works. In the first millennium, these were most likely to be
Gospel Books, such as the
Lindisfarne Gospels and the
Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is the most widely recognized illuminated manuscript in the
Anglosphere, and is famous for its
insular designs. The Romanesque and Gothic periods saw the creation of many large illuminated complete
bibles. The largest surviving example of these is The
Codex Gigas in Sweden; it is so massive that it takes three librarians to lift it. Other illuminated liturgical books appeared during and after the Romanesque period. These included
psalters, which usually contained all 150 canonical psalms, and small, personal devotional books made for lay people known as
books of hours that would separate one's day into eight hours of devotion. These were often richly illuminated with miniatures, decorated initials and floral borders. They were costly and therefore only owned by wealthy patrons, often women. As the production of manuscripts shifted from monasteries to the public sector during the
High Middle Ages, illuminated books began to reflect secular interests. The Gothic period, which generally saw an increase in the production of illuminated books, also saw more secular works such as
chronicles and works of literature illuminated. Wealthy people began to build up personal libraries;
Philip the Bold probably had the largest personal library of his time in the mid-15th century, is estimated to have had about 600 illuminated manuscripts, whilst a number of his friends and relations had several dozen. Wealthy patrons, however, could have personal prayer books made especially for them, usually in the form of richly illuminated "
books of hours", which set down prayers appropriate for various times in the
liturgical day. One of the best known examples is the extravagant for a French prince. of
Ura Kidane Mehret,
Zege Peninsula,
Lake Tana,
Ethiopia Up to the 12th century, most manuscripts were produced in monasteries in order to add to the library or after receiving a
commission from a wealthy patron. Larger monasteries often contained separate areas for the
monks who specialized in the production of manuscripts called a
scriptorium. Within the walls of a scriptorium were individualized areas where a monk could sit and work on a manuscript without being disturbed by his fellow brethren. If no scriptorium was available, then "separate little rooms were assigned to book copying; they were situated in such a way that each scribe had to himself a window open to the cloister walk." By the 14th century, the
cloisters of monks writing in the scriptorium had almost fully given way to commercial urban scriptoria, especially in Paris, Rome and the Netherlands. The
Byzantine world produced manuscripts in its own style, versions of which spread to other Orthodox and Eastern Christian areas. This distinct Byzantine style of illumination had a characteristic color palette along with different ways of preparing pigments and ink and a unique finish to the vellum writing surface which was not as conducive to long term preservation as the more texture Western style. With their
traditions of literacy uninterrupted by the Middle Ages, the
Muslim world, especially on the Iberian Peninsula, was instrumental in delivering ancient classic works to the growing intellectual circles and
universities of Western Europe throughout the 12th century. Books were produced there in large numbers and on
paper for the first time in Europe, and with them full treatises on the sciences, especially astrology and medicine where illumination was required to have profuse and accurate representations with the text. The origins of the pictorial tradition of Arabic illustrated manuscripts are uncertain. The first known decorated manuscripts are some
Qur'ans from the 9th century. They were not illustrated, but were "illuminated" with decorations of the frontispieces or headings. The tradition of illustrated manuscripts started with the
Graeco-Arabic translation movement and the creation of scientific and technical treatises often based on Greek scientific knowledge, such as the Arabic versions of
The Book of Fixed Stars (965 CE),
De materia medica or
Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye. The translators were most often Arab
Syriac Christians, such as
Hunayn ibn Ishaq or
Yahya ibn Adi, and their work is known to have been sponsored by local rulers, such as the
Artuqids. An explosion of artistic production in Arabic manuscripts occurred in the 12th and especially the 13th century. Thus various Syriac manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as
Syriac Gospels, Vatican Library, Syr. 559 or
Syriac Gospels, British Library, Add. 7170, were derived from the Byzantine tradition, yet stylistically have a lot in common with Islamic illustrated manuscripts such as the
Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, pointing to a common pictorial tradition that existed since circa 1180 in
Syria and
Iraq which was highly influenced by
Byzantine art. Some of the illustrations of these manuscript have been characterized as "illustration byzantine traitée à la manière arabe" ("Byzantine illustration treated in the Arab style"). A number of works survive. Some illustrations from the
Middle Ages feature
fantastic creatures—usually animal-headed
humanoids, even when the depictions are quite clearly meant to be those of historical or
mythological humans, known as zoocephalic figures. A well-known example is the
Birds' Head Haggadah (Germany, circa 1300). Although it is theorized that zoocephalic art is to circumvent a prohibition of
aniconism in Judaism, understood to prohibit
idolatry, the fact that some manuscripts also include human faces casts doubt on this assumption. The reasons for this illustration style are not fully understood. The
Ambrosian Bible or Ambrosian Tanakh of 1236 by
Jacob ben Samuel and
Joseph ben Kalonymus is one of the earliest Ashkenazic illuminated manuscripts and
biblical codices. It contains figural representation and depictions of biblical figures such as Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Joseph, Moses, Solomon, David and others. Some of the figures appear with faces obscured or zoocephalic. It was made for a patron probably from
Ulm. The
Leipzig Mahzor also employs a zoocephalic method to depict humans. == Techniques ==