CHAPTER IX.
THE DECORATION OF BOOKS.
Books may be illustrated in a more or less pictorial manner without any particular regard to the decoration of the page, or with due regard to its ornamentation. In the latter case the designer of the decoration will be the illustrator and decorator in one.
The great majority of modern illustrated books are not decorated in the true sense of the word, but have their illustrations inserted as pictures, or scraps of pictures, without borders or frames, and with little or no relation to the distribution of the printed matter or to the boundary lines of the page. In this respect the modern practice is different from that observed in the Mediæval and Renaissance book illustration, for in the two periods named, when a purely literal or pictorial scene was inserted, it had usually borders like mouldings, or borders of rich decoration, or sometimes bands and lines only, which separated the picture from the printed or written text, and harmonized with any other decoration that might be on the page. Thus an artistic unity was usually preserved in the book decoration of earlier times, which, generally speaking, is the exception in the present day, and not the rule.
The modern practice was brought about by the invention of copper-plate engraving—about 1477—when the copper-plate illustration became, in a great measure, the substitute for wood-engraved blocks of a former period. The plates were usually engraved with copies of pictures, and the book decorator was superseded by the painter; the art and practice of the former declined, while the work of the latter became fashionable, and has remained so ever since.
Photography has been a considerable aid to the pictorial side of book illustration, and has, on the other hand, been a great help to designers of decorative illustration, for by the use of photography the designer is enabled to have the work of his hand reproduced in facsimile, as in the process block method, which has been such a powerful rival and competitor to all kinds of engraving that it has now almost crushed them out of existence.
Before the invention of printing books were very scarce, as they were written in manuscript, and were mostly of a devotional character, made for the use of the clergy and others in monastic establishments or religious houses.
The writers and decorators of these missals or illuminated books were chiefly the brothers or monks of the several religious orders.
Some of the earliest and best decorated books are those belonging to the Irish Celtic art of the seventh and eighth centuries. The remarkable designs of illuminated initials and capitals, and the intricate geometric patterns, spirals, and involved interlacings of many varieties, all executed with astonishing skill, were not excelled or equalled by the scribes and designers of similar work in England or on the Continent.
Foremost in importance among the many remaining monuments of Irish art in book decoration is the celebrated “Book of Kells,” now preserved in Trinity College, Dublin. It was formerly supposed to have been brought to the Columban Monastery of Kells, or Kenlis, the ancient Cennanas, by St. Columba, the founder of that Christian house, whose death is said to have taken place in the year 597; but this is likely to be only tradition, for it would appear, according to some later authorities, that the character of the lettering and the style of the ornamentation fixes the date of its execution about the end of the seventh century.
Although the native Irish phase of Celtic art possesses many characteristics of its own, it is a development in some degree of the more Eastern Romanesque ornament, and symbolic Byzantine, or even the more primitive Greek. It is also mixed with a few geometric forms and symbols that had existed in Ireland before the introduction of Christianity in the fifth century.