Minisode 3: Illuminated Manuscripts and Their Making

This minisode is dedicated to the illuminated manuscript, an art form whose heyday stretched from the 5th to the 15th centuries. Come for the cover-to-cover breakdown of the manuscript production process, stay in spite of the Silence of the Calves joke.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Alright, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I will be your host for the next 30 minutes or less. That's right, this is a mini sode, which I categorize as any episode lasting less than 30 minutes. This particular mini sode is a companion, or to be more correct, will be a companion, to episodes 34 and 35, which are not published yet. I'm really close. Really close. It's all written. Just need to find time to record it. I was afraid though that y'all would come at me with pitchforks if I didn't post soon. This script was done, it's pretty short, so I figured let's just record it and get it out. That said, let's get into it. The part where I tell you stuff about an art form that frequently finds itself in the margins of art history. Illuminated manuscripts and how they were made. As suggested by its title, this mini sode will cover a little bit of history about the illuminated manuscript, but it will focus primarily on how these kinds of objects were made. But first, some helpful definitions. The literal definition of the word manuscript is in the word itself, if you happen to know Latin. Manu means hand, and the word scriptus, meaning written. Ergo, therefore, a manuscript is a handwritten text. An illuminated manuscript is a handwritten text that has been quote-unquote illuminated with imagery of some kind. When talking about illuminations that appear in manuscripts, they really run the gamut, including anything and everything from artistic flourishes and decorative patterns to full-on illustrations and whole page images. Now, people who are super old school and stuffy about these things, which is not us, never us, those people may have a stricter definition of what counts as an illuminated manuscript. Namely that quote unquote true illuminated manuscripts feature a significant amount of gold or silver leaf in their decoration. Materials that literally reflect light. However, some of the most famous illuminated manuscripts of all time, like the Book of Kells, for instance, feature little to no gold or silver, which suggests that those people chose the wrong hill to die on. Speaking of dying on a hill, illuminated manuscripts are most commonly associated with Christianity. I'm sorry, did I just make a bad joke about the topographical location of Jesus' crucifixion on Mount Golgotha? Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I'd say it's a deep cut, but um, that'd be taking a bad joke from bad to worse. Specifically, illuminated manuscripts were associated with Christianity in and around Europe. Now, I don't want to mislead you into thinking that illuminated manuscripts were only a European Christian tradition. In fact, it is believed that the art form emerged onto the scene in Europe from the Islamic courts in Spain. The Middle East and Eastern Asia also have a very strong history of producing illuminated texts, whether that took the form of a manuscript or something else like a scroll. For the purposes of this mini sode, I will be talking, for the most part, about illuminated manuscripts in the European tradition. Now, mind you, there's a lot of internal variation that happens with these things, particularly given the spread of time and geography. A manuscript made in 8th century Ireland is probably going to be quite different than one made in 15th century Rome. But let's not let technicalities ruin the fun. In Europe, the golden age of the illuminated manuscript was the Middle Ages, the period in Europe that stretches roughly between the fall of Rome in the 5th century and the invention of the printing press in the 15th, when books could finally be produced and reproduced without having to hand copy them. Can you imagine not just hand copying a book once, but doing that every day as your career until you died at the geriatric age of 32 from the black plague? No, thank you. For much of the Middle Ages, especially the early Middle Ages, religious houses and institutions had the monopoly on manuscript production. That makes sense because throughout that time, books played an essential role in the Christian faith, generally speaking, but also in the spread of Christianity. Because, hey, books travel well and they contain a lot of information. Two birds, one stone. To that end, many monasteries or religious houses established on-site scriptoriums, which is where manuscript production took place and where scribes and illuminators reported for work. Around the 1200s, though, there was a shift in manuscript production due to the rise of European universities, one of the first of which was my kind of alma mater, the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy. With the rise of these universities and scholastic knowledge, the church lost its monopoly on manuscript production, and slowly but surely they would farm out aspects of the manuscript-making process to lay people, or just, you know, normal people living in town, until finally the printing press came along and put all of those people out of a job. When we talk about illuminated manuscripts, we tend to focus primarily on the words and images in those volumes. I mean, duh. But the process of making a manuscript started long before the scribe or the illuminator ever picked up a quill or a brush. Because, hey, you need something to write on, and paper wasn't an option, at least not in Europe. This is where things get a little silence of the lambsy. Instead of paper, the pages of European manuscripts are generally vellum, which is the type of parchment or writing material made from animal skin. The golden standard for vellum production was calf skin, the skin of a baby cow, but it could also be produced from goat and sheepskin. Younger animals were always preferable, as their skin, being more supple, was better suited to producing a high-quality product. I warned you, Silence of the Lambsy, or I don't know, calvesy, I guess. Minus the, you know, mass slaughter of animals, vellum is actually a really great material for making manuscripts because it's durable. If you ever have the pleasure of handling a vellum manuscript in the future, you know, it doesn't tend to be on everyone's bucket list, but you never know, you will sometimes even see that pages that have ripped have been mended with needle and thread. That's right, they give the book stitches. Which actually makes a lot of sense because it is skin. You might be thinking, Lindsay, how in the heck did they make parchment from calf skin? Well, it starts with butchering and skinning an animal, or more accurately, animals. Some of these manuscripts were two, three, four, five hundred pages long. That's a lot of animal skin. Once the animal was skinned, the parchment maker would submerge the hide into a chemical bath, specifically some kind of lime bath, creating the medieval equivalent of a bathtub full of Nair. My ladies and gentlemen who engaged the store-bought chemical hair removal in the 90s and early 2000s will not only understand that reference, they'll be able to smell it. Nair has an atrocious scent. The hide is soaked in this medieval version of Nair in order to remove each and every hair and bit of fat from the hide, resulting in this like gross, wet, slippery skin blanket. The parchment maker then takes that gross, wet, slippery skin blanket and puts it on a stretcher, where it's stretched until it's super taut, at which point the skin undergoes a series of scrapings. The idea was to make the skin as thin as possible without risking ripping. After being stretched and scraped, the skin is then left to dry on the stretcher. And when it's totally dry, it's ready to be taken down and cut into what will eventually be book pages. Et voila! Your wet slippery skin blanket is now parchment, and you, my friend, are ready to make a manuscript. Alright, this is where things start to get technical with some more specialized vocabulary, so stick with me. The most basic building block of a manuscript is a bifolio, which is a single sheet of parchment that is folded in half to make a crease down its center. It's the same concept as when kids make their parents' cards in art class. You take a piece of paper and you fold it hamburger style. And how fitting. Because cow. A number of bifolios or bifolium were then nested together, meaning that they were put one inside of another and subsequently stitched together along that center crease. The result was a little booklet known as a gathering, or the fancier term is a choir. Now there was no standard number of pages in a gathering, but most often each gathering would create between eight and twenty pages, give or take, meaning that between four and ten bifolios were used in the process, because each bifolio makes two pages. In case you haven't figured it out yet, the prefix by means two. Those gatherings were then stacked, this time one on top of another and stitched together to create a spine, leaving you with something that looks an awful lot like a book. It is important, dare I say critical, to point out that the writing and illumination of those pages happened when the pages were still loose, when they were still bifolios, which again were individual rectangles of parchment with creases down their centers. Each half of the bifolio will eventually become a page of the book. This too has an official name, which is a folio, Latin for leaf. The fact that every bifolio will produce two pages in the finished book makes the process of writing and illuminating these folios before they're bound a little bit like a puzzle. Because given how the bifolios were stacked and stitched together, the two pages that shared a bifolio would rarely appear side by side in the finished book. Therefore, scribes and illuminators had to plot and map out what they were putting where so that the finished product made sense. Speaking of pages or folios, it's also worth pointing out that manuscript pages are numbered a bit differently than modern books. Today we're used to numbering things back and front. You read page one, you turn it over, and bam, there's page two. That is not the case for manuscripts. For manuscripts, each individual page or folio has its own number, and then letters are used to clarify what side of the page one is talking about. R for recto, meaning front, and V for verso, meaning the back. So if someone refers to folio 13V, they are referring to the back of folio 13. Purists might have a bit of an issue with me using the words folio and page interchangeably, but um I don't care. I also can't be fluffed to check the accuracy of my Latin plurals. Deal with it. As I said before, the writing and illumination of a manuscript happened before any of the bifolios were gathered and bound. The two key roles in that process were the scribe, the writer, and the illuminator, the painter, or the image maker. Sometimes a person could be both, and depending on the project, there could be a team of scribes and illuminators working on that project simultaneously. In those cases, there's usually more variation in the images than there is in the text. Because remember, calligraphy is different than handwriting. Scribes were trained to write in certain scripts, certain calligraphic styles. Because of that, there's often very little variation within the text of a manuscript. Dum-dums like you and I wouldn't be able to tell if scribe one did that page and scribe two did the other. Basically identical. There are, however, professionals who study that kind of thing for a living. They're called paleographers. And while that kind of work doesn't make my toes tingle, you know, whatever, what's your quill? Generally speaking, the scribe was the first person to work with a page, after the people who made that page, of course. Scribes would start their work by lining the page to provide them with guidelines in order to keep everything neat, tidy, and even. There were a few ways that they could do this, but the least intrusive one was to take some kind of sharp-ish utensil and use that with a straight edge ruler, for lack of a better word, to create guidelines by pressing that utensil into the vellum, leaving behind indentations that could guide them. When that was done, it was time to get writing. How did they know what to write? Well, most manuscripts are a copy of another manuscript, one referred to as the exemplar or the model. That practice has turned many a manuscript scholar into the art historical version of Ancestry.com. For example, if you have two manuscripts from around the same time and around the same place, that both feature the same misspelling in the same place or in the same word, it's likely that those both derived from the same model, or maybe even that one of them was the model for the other. Can we absolutely prove that? No. But it certainly suggests some kind of relationship between those two texts. The scribe's primary instrument was a quill, which is a pen made from a bird's feather that had been washed, dried, and hardened before being trimmed and prepared for use. The scribes also prepared their own inks by mixing powdered pigments with something known as a binder. But we'll come back to that. If the scribe made a mistake, and they often did, it's not like they scrapped the whole piece of parchment. Instead, they erased the error by scraping away the top layer of vellum and redid their work. If the vellum was prepared properly and not stretched too thin, it could easily withstand the occasional boo-boo. Once the scribe was done with the writing, the page would go to the illuminator. There were a few ways that illuminators could go about their work, but they usually sketched things out before working directly on the page. They might use sketchbooks, but more commonly they used reusable sketch pads featuring a thick layer of wax. They could sketch into that wax layer, and then when they were done, they could simply melt it down, allowing them to reuse the pad as many times as they wanted. For really elaborate works, illuminators might use a super thin sheer piece of parchment, the medieval equivalent of tracing paper. They would work their design out on that thin piece of parchment and then use a needle-like tool to prick holes along the outlines of the image. They would then place that prepared tracing paper onto the bifolio and apply some kind of charcoal powder or soot over the perforated lines, creating tiny dotted outlines on the vellum below that they could follow. Once the outline was all set, the illuminator would start with gold or silver leaf, if that was on the menu for this particular illumination. Now that might seem odd. Why start with that? Isn't the age-old adage save the best for last? Yeah, but that person clearly was not talking about gold leaf. For those of you who have never seen or worked with gold leaf, and like, why would you? It is a very, very thinly hammered sheet of gold. Today you can buy imitation gold leaf at a craft store for like eight bucks. So if you're curious and you have eight dollars to spare, knock yourself out. Gold Leaf is what I like to call a tricky business. It's very, very tricky because it will adhere to basically anything, including dried paint. And once it does that, you screwed, because there is no getting that off without ruining your entire illumination. When applying gold leaf, the illuminator would first apply an adhesive to the places where the gold leaf would go. Once that was dry, they would use a brush or some kind of utensil to pick up a portion of the delicate gold leaf, give the adhesive a little with their breath, and then lay down the leaf. That little puff of breath, the was enough to make the gold leaf attach to the adhesive. The illuminator would then brush away any excess gold leaf and burnish what remained to a shiny finish. It was therefore important to work bit by bit with the gold leaf to ensure that the majority of it got onto the page and wasn't brushed onto the floor. Once that was done, it was time to start making your paints. Much like ink, paints were made using pigments derived from basically anything, from minerals to the secretions of shellfish to bugs. Yes, I said bugs. Look up how they make the red pigment carmine and prepared to be disgusted. And if you think that shellfish secretions in powdered beetles is bad, just wait until you find out what went into making the color mummy brown. Did they use that to make illuminated manuscripts? Not to my knowledge, but it's still super gross. Paints were made by finely grinding those pigments and mixing them with a binder. Common binders included things like egg whites and tree resins. The binder element was essential. If you mixed up a paint without some kind of binder element, you would essentially paint it onto the page, wait for it to dry, and watch in horror as it crumbles off. Bad news bears. Once they had their paints mixed, illuminators started with the lightest, palest colors and then moved on to darker tones. Somewhat counterintuitively, the final thing that the illuminator worked on were the outlines. Depending on its size and level of detail, an illumination could take anywhere from an hour to several weeks, if not several months, to complete. Each one really is a mini artwork onto itself. Once both the scribe and the illuminator were done, the bifolios were collected and given over to the binder, by which I mean the person responsible for producing the finished volume and not a bunch of egg whites. The binder started by dividing the bifolios into gatherings, which they would then sew together with a very strong thread, usually with the help of some supporting cords that end up looking a little bit like vertebrates along the book's spine. The binder would then use the ends of those cords to attach wooden boards to the front and the back of the soon to be book, which, when covered in leather, formed the cover, and if the Binder was feeling a little spicy, he might even install a clasp on the cover to ensure that the cover closed tight, further protecting the parchment from its environment-bound self-destructive tendencies. Things like moisture or lack of moisture or even light can cause damage to the parchment, whether that means warping it, making it brittle, fading it. Really, there's any number of ways for things to go wrong. Proper covers can help prevent that, at least to a point. Because the one thing that covers can't save a book from is being, hmm, I don't know, a thousand years old. Speaking of, it's worth noting that many manuscripts, especially really old ones, are almost always rebound at some point in their history. Someone basically takes them apart and reputs them back together. It's also possible, and even downright prudent, for older, thicker manuscripts to at some point be split up into separate volumes. Otherwise, the spines of these manuscripts get so stressed that it causes things like cracking, books falling apart, losing pages, and a bunch of other not great stuff. As to what these books contained content-wise, illuminated manuscripts could assume any number of forms, but the most elaborate were almost always intended for liturgical use, which is a fancy way of saying used during church services like Mass. During Mass, these books served as tools, in that they contained important texts, but also as ornament, as physical objects so opulent that they brought glory to God. In the later medieval age, personal illuminated manuscripts also became increasingly common, at least among the people who could, one, afford them, they were hella expensive, and two, read. Those lucky people would often commission a type of illuminated manuscript known as a book of hours, hours is in the measurement of time, which was a type of prayer book that one could consult and read during private moments of prayer and devotion. By the 1400s, manuscripts were falling by the wayside, particularly after the invention of the printing press. Because, um, who wants to hand copy books if a machine can do it? The calves rejoiced and became leather goods instead. About 300 years later, in the 1800s and early 1900s, manuscripts had something of a revival, but the revival was pretty short-lived and petered out by the First World War. In the modern day, manuscripts are often relegated to the margins of art history. And yes, as art historians, we are contractually obligated to make a pun on the word margin whenever talking about illuminated manuscripts. That said, there's always been interest in them, especially by museums and private collectors. And let me tell you, these things aren't getting any cheaper. Insert bad joke about inflation here. In April of 2021, a 15th-century illuminated manuscript sold at auction for a cool $3.6 million. As Gus would say, woof. If that's a little out of your price range, fear not. You can also buy what are called facsimiles of illuminated manuscripts. Now a true facsimile would be an exact copy of a manuscript down to the materials used. These days, though, it's generally frowned upon to slaughter dozens of animals to live out your fantasy of being an 8th-century monk. And thank God for that. Instead, facsimiles are now made using high-quality photographs of the pages of the original, and the really good ones are made to scale. But even those might cost you a pretty penny. In 1990, a publishing house in Lucerne, Switzerland produced 1,500 facsimiles of the famous illuminated manuscript, The Book of Kells. Those facsimiles have since become something of collector's items in and of themselves, and you too can own one for the bargain price of $10,000. To make this all the more inception-y, I once had a professor tell me a story about how it took him months and a boatload of paperwork to arrange a visit to see a facsimile of a famous manuscript. Not even the real thing, a copy. And was he permitted to touch it? No, no, no, no, no touchy. I suppose in some ways his experience stayed true to how us peasants would have experienced illuminated manuscripts all those years ago. Looking was encouraged, but if you dare put your dirty peasant myths on the manuscript itself, well, I'm not sure any of them lived long enough to find out. And those who did probably got their dirty little fingers broken. To be fair though, a few of these manuscripts are absolutely worth a few broken fingers. And some are even beautiful enough to die for.com. It does usually take me a little while, but I always do respond. Also keep an eye on your podcast feed. There should be quite a bit of content coming out in the next few months. I'm excited, and I hope that you are too. The usual thanks go out to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music featured in each episode. The first song you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number four by Kevin McLeod, while the other jauntier tune is called Success Dreams. And before you go, before you go, don't forget to look at something beautiful today.