Pleasant work.No one who examines a fine mediaeval manuscript can help seeing in it the strongest marks of the delight which the illuminator had in his work; and this sort of retrospective sympathy with the pleasure of the workman in his work is an important element in the beauty of ancient works of art of many different kinds and dates, from the simple but beautiful wheel-turned vase of the Greek potter, down to the carved foliage in a Gothic church, or the complicated ornamentation of an illuminated initial.
| Relief from monotony. |
Relief from monotony.Again, it should be remembered that the life of a mediaeval monk was a very uneventful and monotonous one, and even the most pious soul must at times have felt a weariness in the oft-repeated and lengthy Offices which made him spend so large a proportion of each day within the Choir of his monastic church. Thus it was that his work as an illuminator of manuscripts provided the one great relief from his otherwise grey and monotonous life, from which he turned to revel in every variety of fanciful shape and of varied arrangement of gleaming gold and brilliant pigments. Here at least was no monotony, but the fullest scope for imaginative fancy and the love of variety which is inborn in the human mind.
| Scope for humour. Grotesque figures. |
Scope for humour.In the illumination of his manuscript the monastic scribe, even when decorating a sacred book, could lay aside for a moment the solemn religious thoughts to which his vows had bound him; he could sport with every variety of grotesque monster and of Pagan imagery, and could find vent for his repressed sense of fun and humour by the introduction of caricatures and pictorial jokes of all kinds among the foliage of his borders and initials without any fear of reproof on the part of his superiors[[208]]. Grotesque figures.Fig. [52] from a French fourteenth century manuscript shows a characteristic example of an illuminators humorous fancy, a grotesque Bishop, with a mitre made out of a pair of bellows.
Fig. 52. Grotesque figure from a French manuscript of the fourteenth century.
Very frequently the jealousy which existed between the Regular and the Secular Clergy is expressed in the pictorial sarcasms of the monastic illuminators. This feeling, on the Secular side, is vividly set forth in the amusing Latin Poems of Walter Map[[209]], who, toward the close of the twelfth century, was the Parish Priest of a little church in the Forest of Dean[[210]]. Walter Map's satire is mainly directed against the Cistercian order of monks, with whom he was specially brought into contact owing to his parish being situated near the Cistercian Abbey of Flaxley.
| Humorous scene. |
Humorous scene.Fig. [53]. from a German manuscript of the end of the twelfth century, now in the Chapter library of Prague Cathedral, gives an interesting example of the introduction of a humorous scene into a grave work, Saint Augustine's De civitate Dei. The illuminator, who was named Hildebert, has been worried by a mouse, which stole his food; and here on the last leaf of the manuscript he represents himself interrupted in his work and throwing something at the mouse which is nibbling at his food. These explanatory words are written on the open page of his book,