| Rules of the Guilds. |
Rules of the Guilds.No miniaturist could be admitted till he had laid before the Dean of the Guild a sufficiently good sample of his skill, and all members were liable to be fined if they used inferior materials of any kind, such as impure gold, adulterated ultramarine or vermilion and the like. In this way the officers of the Guild acted as moderators between the artisan and his patrons, securing reasonable pay for the artist, and, in return for that, reasonably good workmanship for his employer or customer. The Guilds also prevented anything like commercial slave-driving by limiting very strictly the number of apprentices or workmen that each master might employ.
| Decadence of MS. art. |
Decadence of MS. art.Thus it happened that, though fine manuscripts were still written and illuminated in many of the principal monasteries of Europe, a large class of secular illuminators grew up, especially in Paris and the chief towns of Flanders and northern Germany. In this way the production of manuscripts, especially illuminated Books of Hours, became a regular commercial process, with the inevitable result that a great deal of work of a very inferior character was turned out to meet the rapidly growing demand for cheap and showy books.
An immense number of these cheap manuscript Horae were produced after a few fixed patterns, with some mechanical dulness of repetition in every border and miniature with which they were decorated.
| Costly Horae. |
Costly Horae.At the same time manuscripts were still produced, mostly at the special order of some royal patron or wealthy merchant, which, in elaborate beauty and in unsparing labour of execution, are hardly surpassed by the work of the earlier monastic scribes[[229]]. Examples of this are mentioned above at pages [135] and [169].
The Dukes of Burgundy and the Kings of France, towards the close of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century, numbered many illuminators among their regular paid adherents. In some cases the artist was permanently engaged, and passed his whole life in the service of one Prince; while in other cases famous illuminators were hired for a few months or years, when the patron wanted a specially magnificent manuscript either for his own use, or as a royal gift on the occasion of a marriage, a coronation or other great event.
| Women artists. |
Women artists.In some cases, we find that women learnt to be manuscript illuminators of great skill and artistic taste. For example Cornelia, the wife of Gérard David of Bruges[[230]], was, like her husband, both an illuminator of manuscripts and a painter of altar retables. A fine triptych painted by Cornelia, in the possession of Mr H. Willett of Brighton, is a work of great beauty and refinement, which it would be difficult to distinguish from a painting by Gérard David himself.