Illuminated manuscripts in classical and mediaeval times, their art and their technique

by J. H. Middleton

Works on bindings.

Works on bindings.With regard to books on the subject of early bindings; it is much to be regretted that existing works, of which there are a great many, especially in French, all begin just about the period when bindings of the greatest interest and the truest artistic value were no longer made. Plenty has been written about the costly bindings in which Grolier, Maioli, and other wealthy book-buyers had their purchases encased, but no work exists on the bindings of the mediaeval period, when, frequently, the covers of a manuscript were as much a labour of love as the illuminated pages within. The sixteenth century binders, who worked for Grolier and other rich patrons of art, lived at the verge of a commercial epoch, and though their works are often very pretty and technically of high merit, yet they cannot be compared, as true works of art, with the bindings of the period before printing was invented.

Small cost of MSS.

Small cost of MSS.The present value of illuminated manuscripts. On the whole a fine manuscript may be regarded as about the cheapest work of art of bygone days that can now be purchased by an appreciative collector. Many of the finest and most perfectly preserved manuscripts which now come into the market are actually sold for smaller sums than they would have cost when they were new, in spite of the great additional value and interest which they have gained from their antiquity and comparative rarity.

For example, a beautiful and perfectly preserved historiated Anglo-Norman Vulgate of the thirteenth century, with its full number of eighty-two pictured initials, written on between six and seven hundred leaves of the finest uterine vellum, can now commonly be purchased for from £30 to £40. This hardly represents the original value of the vellum on which the manuscript is written.

Manuscripts of a simpler character, however beautifully written, if they are merely decorated with blue and red initials, commonly sell for considerably less than the original cost of their vellum[^[301]].

Again, the more costly manuscripts of fine style, which now fetch several hundred pounds, usually contain a wealth of pictorial decoration and laborious execution far in excess of that which could be purchased for a similar sum in any other branch of art.

Want of taste.

Want of taste.Another noticeable point is that the modern pecuniary values of manuscripts, even those which are bought only as works of art, are by no means in proportion to their real artistic merits. Manuscripts of the finest period of the illuminator's art, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, are now sold for very much smaller sums than the immeasurably inferior but more showy and over-elaborated manuscripts of the period of decadence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Modern want of taste.