Monastic painters.Vasari, in his life of Don Lorenzo Monaco[[176]], mentions a Camaldolese monk of the Monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Florence, who, about the year 1350, wrote and illuminated a number of magnificent choir-books for his monastery, which were very highly valued; Don Silvestro.so much so that after the death of the monk, whose name was Don Silvestro, his hand was preserved in a shrine as a sacred relic of the dead monk's piety and skill[[177]]. Some of Don Silvestro's manuscripts are now preserved in the Laurentian library in Florence, and a number of miniatures cut out of his choir-books were acquired by W. Young Ottley[[178]].
| MSS. of Don Silvestro. Methods of decoration. |
MSS. of Don Silvestro.The existing works of Don Silvestro show that the enthusiasm of his fellow monks was not exaggerated. The miniatures are noble in style, finished with the most exquisitely minute touch, splendidly brilliant in colour, and in every way masterpieces of the illuminator's art. These choir-books are of enormous size, being intended to be placed on the central choir lectern so that the whole body of monks standing round could chant the antiphonalia from the same book, and the initials are proportionately large to the size of the page. Thus some of the figures of Saints which fill the central spaces of the large initials are as much as from six to seven inches in height, and yet they are painted with the minute detail of an ordinary sized miniature. Methods of decoration.The grounds of these splendid figures are usually of burnished gold, decorated by incised tooling of diapers or scroll-work; and the floreated borders, which surround the letters and form marginal ornaments to the pages, consist of nobly designed conventional foliage in vermilion, ultramarine and other fine pigments, relieved and lighted up by bosses of burnished gold thickly sprinkled among the sumptuous coloured foliage. Tooled and burnished gold is also used largely for the decoration of the dresses of the figures, their crowns, jewelled ornaments and the apparels and orphreys of their vestments. The whole effect is magnificent in the extreme, and yet, in spite of the dazzling brilliance of the gold and colours, the whole effect is perfectly harmonious and free from the harsh gaudiness which disfigures so much of the late fifteenth century work of the French and Flemish manuscript painters.
| Italian ornament. |
Italian ornament.The special style of ornament used by Don Silvestro survived in Italian illumination for nearly a century and a half. In Italy realistic forms of fruit and flowers, such as were painted with such taste and skill by the northern miniaturists, were scarcely ever used. All through the fifteenth century, alike in the manuscripts of the Florentine, Sienese and Venetian schools, the same purely conventional forms of foliage were used, with great curling leaves, alternately blue and red, lighted up by the jewel-like studs and bosses of burnished gold.
| The monk Don Lorenzo. |
The monk Don Lorenzo.According to Vasari, the same Camaldolese Monastery produced another manuscript illuminator whose skill was hardly inferior to that of Don Silvestro. This was Don Lorenzo, who appears to have been born about 1370, and to have died about 1425[[179]]. Examples of his skill, also in the form of large choir-books, are preserved in the Laurentian library at Florence; they are rich with miniatures of great beauty, and, like Don Silvestro's paintings, show a lavish expenditure of time and patience in the exquisite minuteness with which they are finished. Vasari tells us that his hand also was preserved as a sacred relic in the treasury of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
| Visit of Leo X. |
Visit of Leo X.In later times Pope Leo X., who, like other members of the Medici family, was an enthusiastic lover of illuminated manuscripts, when on a visit to the Monastery, desired to carry away to the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome some of these choir-books by the hand of Don Lorenzo[[180]].
| Dominican painters. |