The Book Pages

The book pages are scanned from a colour photocopy of the book which I gilded and assembled into a facsimile of the original. The vellum itself was quite differently coloured on the flesh and hair sides, which explains the big difference in colour between the recto and verso pages. Also, the photocopies themselves came out with somewhat different colour values. Technically, vellum is quite hard to colour photocopy or scan accurately, because its translucency creates partial reflections and it transmits red light better than any other (which is not surprising -- try putting your hand in front of a light bulb and notice the effect).

General Style and Major Sources

The general style of the illumination is early-to mid-fifteenth century French, with a little Italian borrowing; the book is actually a hybrid of several styles. The form follows illuminated romances, where pages of text with relatively little decoration are interspersed with miniature pages containing little text but much decoration. Because of the limited amount of text in this book, the text and miniature pages alternate.

The main sources are King Rene of Anjou's Book of the Heart Possessed by Love [1], an allegorical romance written circa 1457, and The Prayerbook of Michelino da Besozzo [2], circa 1410. Michelino's prayerbook was the primary influence on the page borders, while Rene's book was the primary influence for the illumination style.

	Click to see a page from Michellino's prayerbook (St Lucy)
	here to see a page from the Rene master's book

Materials and Construction

The pages of the book are calf vellum, from the only local supplier. I bought a whole hide, the whitest of those he had available. The hide had been quite thoroughly prepared (on a belt sander!), but was rather thicker than I wished, so I sanded down the flesh side a good deal with fine emery paper to smooth and thin it (I also sanded the hair side to remove the few remaining hairs). However, the vellum is still thicker than that which would have been used in a medieval book, and this caused some problems, particularly with the gilding.

The pages were cut from the edges and one end, which means they tend to warp unless coerced flat. The endpages and flyleaves are "vellum-like'' paper, for flexibility; it would have been extremely difficult to glue the thick vellum to the cover properly. The book is bound as a single signature, using the sewing pattern described in a modern bookbinding text [3], with linen thread. As far as I could see from pictures of medieval books, modern signature sewing patterns are not strikingly different from medieval ones (c.f. the Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1546 [4]). A piece of bookbinder's cloth almost as high as the pages and about half their width was placed on the back of the signature before it was stitched, which takes the place of the tapes normally used on medieval books. The bookbinder's cloth, and the end-papers, are glued to the cover with ordinary craft glue.

The cover is heavy cardboard, covered in black suede, which is also glued in place. Commercially-available corner protectors and clasps give a simulation of the bindings I have seen illustrated in and for Books of Hours and other manuscripts.

Ink, Paints, and Gilding Materials

The calligraphy ink is Rotring Rapidograph, a totally modern ink, but black and free-flowing; the calligraphy was done with an Osmiroid dip-pen, using a Medium Italic nib.

Windsor and Newton Designer's Gouache was used for all painting, this being the nearest equivalent to period paints currently commercially available. They were just mixed with ordinary tap water.

The gilding was done with gold transfer leaf, and shell gold was used for the fine highlights in the miniatures themselves. I used a prepared gilding mix from a local calligraphy shop to attach the gold leaf, but I am not happy with the results. This was my first major effort in gilding (I had done two single pages previously), and I did not realise how thinly that gilding mix needed to be applied for it to dry properly; it retained too much resilience if applied thickly enough to give a good smooth finish to the gold. This resulted in the gold rubbing through against the stiff vellum, and the pages sticking together, pulling bits off some of the illuminations and borders, which had to be retouched. I do raised gilding on plaster-based gesso now :-).

Layout

The page size is approximately 5" x 61/2", well within the range of medieval books (for example, Michelino's prayerbook is 43/4" x 63/4"; the London Hours of Rene of Anjou [5] is 65/8" x 83/4"; the Hours of Peter II, Duke of Brittany [6] is 51/4" x 71/2"), if perhaps a trifle squarer than many such books.

To stretch the thirteen verses into enough material, including dedication page and armorial flyleaves, for an actual book, I laid them out with two verses on the left-hand page and one verse on the right beneath a miniature appropriate to the narrative at that point. I think, however, if I were doing the book again, I would lay three verses out on the text pages as I had in my very early sketches and have the miniatures occupy a whole page to themselves, to give a more rectangular format. I would also make the pages larger to give more white space around the illuminated areas, especially at the bottom of the page. To make sure I painted everything correctly, I made up a little paper booklet when I did my rough sketches, so I would know what went on the back and front of each page. Two of these are shown at the right. With only two verses of the song on each text page, some sort of decoration was necessary at the head and foot of these pages to fill in the empty space. I had originally intended a full border around each text page, wider at the top and bottom, but I found that this would make the pages far too wide in proportion to their length, so I reduced it to just the top and bottom borders.

Two of the sketch-booklet pages

Page layout with pin-prick holes

Miniatures framed in a gilded arch are found in manuscripts from the beginning of the 15th century until at least its close--see, for example, the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berri [8], the Livre des symples medichines, autrement dit Arboriste [9], and the Book of Hours for Englebert of Nassau, by the Master of Mary of Burgundy [10]. These latter two also have quite unornamented, simple arches like the ones I have used, although this does seem to be more characteristic of the latter half of the century. Given the curving flower borders, and the size and general composition of the miniatures, I thought the simple arches more appropriate than more elaborate ones. On the left is my layout sheet, showing the pin-prick holes I used to get the lines for the text in the right places and the arch on the miniature pages -- I rubbed graphite onto the back of the page behind the arch and used a stylus to trace it onto the page below.

Design

Working copy of the text

I needed to know how big the text would be, so I wrote out a reasonable copy of the text in the hand I was going to use, and made photocopies of it so I could play cut-and-paste with the verses. It was then that I then realised I could not fit three verses on one page, and ended up with the layout descibed above. After I had decided what I wanted to have in the miniatures and made the rough sketch booklet, I armed myself with a pencil and a sheet of tracing paper and browsed my collection of medieval book reprints. I did this because, although I can paint just fine, I can't actually draw figures very well. So I resorted to the splendid old medieval tradition of copying someone else's work. :-)

On the right is the tracing sheet, with the figures at their original size but altered ready for photocopying -- for example, the knight figures have been turned into Daemon, Isabeau's headgear is consistent, and the bishop from the marriage scene I borrowed has been turned into a king. Next step was to use a photocopier (instead of an apprentice :-) to enlarge/reduce the figures to the size I needed. By now I had a set of full-page layouts drawn, with their flower borders drawn in. I attacked the photocopies with scissors, and cut-and-pasted the figures into the miniature frames in their right positions. I could now draw the backgrounds for the miniatures, and make good photocopies of the final layouts. To get the layouts onto the vellum, I turned the pages into do-it-yourself carbon paper by scribbling graphite from a B2 pencil onto the backs of the pages, and tracing with a stylus. (I find a fine-point ballpoint pen with no ink left in it makes an excellent stylus, by the way.)

Tracing paper with customised figures

Final layout page used to trace onto the vellum

Back of the same page showing home-made "carbon paper"

Illumination Details

The text page top and bottom decorations of a golden bar entwined by a flowering stem are slightly adapted from the lateral borders of the text pages of Michelino's prayerbook; the stem in those borders runs immediately beside the bar or twines very closely around it, sending sprigs of flowers and foliage off on one side only. I made my flowers twine more loosely and branch to both sides in order to widen the borders, as per the constraints mentioned above. I also included more little golden spiked roundels, after the manner of King Rene's book, for the same purpose, and, especially around the miniatures, to help give the same filled-page effect.

In truth, the flowers are too large to properly re-create the effect of the Rene Master's work; this, more than the fact that the flowers are taken from two sources, is why I earlier described the book as a hybrid. The page borders are filled quite closely, according to the style of the mid- to late-15th century, but the relative coarseness of the decorations themselves is far more reminiscent of the very early part of that century.

When looking through the Rene Master's work, one is most struck by the lucent and highly naturalistic qualities of his miniatures. I tried to produce something of this effect by copying his use of clear, light-toned colours for sky and ground, and I think I at least partially succeeded. I cannot pretend I am in the artistic class of either Michelino or the Rene Master, but I have tried to combine something of the lovely detailed little plants in Michelino's miniatures (as well as individual flowers in the borders) with the Rene Master's narrative skills, figure handling, and general background (plus a little borrowing from the Limbourg brothers for the Wylde Wood).

 

 

Example of Michellino's delicate little plants (detail from St Catherine)

Arms of the Owners

It was not only usual, but almost mandatory to include the arms of those who had commissioned a book in its decorations; thus I have included the devices of Mistress Isabeau and Sir Daemon on the front and back pages of this little book. (Indeed, to follow the most common practice, I should have sprinkled them liberally throughout the pages as well, but there was no room.)

Calligraphy

The hand is Gothic Textura Quadrata style, which was common throughout the fifteenth century, though somewhat less so towards its close. It would probably have been a little more appropriate, given the general style of the illuminations, to have used the Batarde Gothic hand for the text, but I wished it to be as readable as possible to those not particularly familiar with the various calligraphic hands, and so stuck to the plain gothic. The precise form of the hand is taken from Drogin [11].

It would also have been rather more typical to have elaborated the initials on the text pages a little with flowers or ivy leaves or suchlike, but I wanted to keep my initials down pretty much to the size of my text, and did not then feel confident of doing a reasonable elaboration on such a small scale. If I were doing it again, one of the ways I would stretch the text length would be to sightly enlarge the text initials and include something appropriate in them.

Similarly, I have been unable to document plain, un-filigreed gold initial letters such as are found directly beneath the miniatures; although I'm fairly sure I've seen them, I cannot find where. I am not actually quite sure why I did not filigree these initials, except that the pages were getting rather crowded. I have considered adding filigree since then, but have refrained since it is very awkward to work on the pages now they are bound into the book.

References

[1] The Master of King Rene of Anjou, Le Cueur d'Amours Espris, French, 1457.

[2] The Prayerbook of Michelino da Besozzo, reproduced from the Illu- minated Manuscript (M 944) belonging to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, George Braziller, New York, 1996

[3] A.W. Lewis, Basic Bookbinding, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1957.

[4] Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1546, Pierpont Morgan Library M. 69, in Books of Hours, John Hartman, Thames and Hudson, 1977.

[5] The London Hours of Rene of Anjou, early fifteenth century, British Library, London, Egerton ms. 1070, in Books of Hours, John Hartman, Thames and Hudson, 1977.

[6] The Hours of Peter II, Duke of Brittany, 1455-57, Biblioth` Nationale, Paris, ms. lat. 1159, in Books of Hours, John Hartman, Thames and Hudson, 1977.

[7] Theophilus, On Divers Arts, probably c. 1100, translated by J. G. Hawthorne and C.S. Smith, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1963.

[8] Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, 1411-16, Muse Conde, Chantilly, George Braziller, Inc., New York, 1969.

[9] Livre des symples medichines, autrement dit Arboriste, MS Fr. 9136, 15th century, in Medieval Woman, An Illuminated Calendar, Sally Fox, Workman Publishing, new York, 1992.

[10] A Book of Hours for Englebert of Nassau, the Master of Mary of Burgundy, c. 1470, The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Introduction by J.J.G. Alexander, George Braziller Inc., New York, 1970.

[11] Drogin, Marc, Medieval Calligraphy, Its History and Technique, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1980.