[Plate VIII.] is intended to draw out all the capabilities of the illuminator. Raised, burnished, and engraved, or indented gold, are essential to a proper realization of a revival of such old work; and the student who would rival in his productions the sober richness of the brushes of the artist monks of the fourteenth century, must carefully study the combinations of colour given in the "Mappæ Clavicula." Figs. 2, 5, and 6, offer examples of the tesselated burnished diaper grounds, and fillings in, which superseded to a great extent the flat burnished golden grounds of earlier dates. Such diapers are little less well adapted for walls or ceilings than they are for book decoration. It can be scarcely necessary to dwell upon what must be perfectly obvious, the great beauty of the initial letters (figs. 1, 3, and 4) given on this sheet.
[Plate IX.] is a careful outline of the above.
[Plate X.], from the Missal of Ferdinand and Isabella (British Museum, Add. 1851), described at page 57 of the "Historical Manual," introduces us to the pictorial, or rather miniature style,—one, which can only be excelled in by those who are prepared to devote themselves to painting as no longer a decorative, but as essentially a "fine art." Far am I from saying that the highest possible art was not brought to bear upon much Mediæval illumination; all that I would convey is, that care and neatness may produce very respectable reproductions of ordinary ornamental work, such as was commonly used during the fourteenth, and early in the fifteenth centuries; but that they alone will be found quite inadequate to imitate successfully the highly modelled and fully shadowed foliage, landscape, architectural groups, and figure subjects, which incessantly recur in books illuminated at periods corresponding with the great Renaissance of art under the Van Eycks and Memlings of Flanders, the Durers of Germany, and the Peruginos, Pinturicchios, and Raffaelles, of Italy.
[Plate XI.], fully coloured from the same source as Plate X., can only be satisfactorily copied by the student, who may have learnt to shadow with the brush from either objects "in the round," or from really good copies, either by very great personal devotion and perseverance, or under an experienced master.
[Plate XII.] gives a careful outline of the preceding plate.
M. D. W.
37, Tavistock Place, London.
April, 1861.
