The town of Illorin was founded, towards the close of the 18th century, by Yoruba, and rose to be the capital of one of the Yoruba kingdoms. About 1825 the kingdom, which had come under Mahommedan influence, ceased its connexion with the Yoruba states and became an emirate of the Sokoto empire. The Fula, however, maintained the Yoruba system of government, which places the chief power in a council of elders. In 1897 Illorin was occupied by the forces of the Royal Niger Company, and the emir placed himself “entirely under the protection and power of the company.” After the assumption of authority by the British government in 1900, Illorin was organized for administration on the same system as the remainder of northern Nigeria. The emir took the oath of allegiance to the sovereign of Great Britain. A resident was placed at his court. Courts of justice have been established and British garrisons quartered at various places in the province. (See also [Nigeria] and [Lagos].)
ILLUMINATED MSS.—“Illumination,” in art, is a term used to signify the embellishment of written or printed text or design with colours and gold, rarely also with silver. The old form of the verb “to illuminate” was “to enlumine” (O. Fr. enluminer; Lat. illuminare, “to throw light on,” “to brighten”), as used by Chaucer (A.B.C., 73), “kalendres enlumyned ben they,” and other medieval writers. Joinville likens the action of St Louis in adorning his kingdom with monastic foundations to a writer “qui a fait son livre qui l’enlumine d’or et d’azur”; while Dante (Purgat. xi. 79) alludes to this kind of decoration as “quell’ arte che alluminare chiamata è in Parisi.” But while the term should be strictly applied to the brilliant book-ornamentation which was developed in the later middle ages, it has been extended, by usage, to the illustration and decoration of early MSS. in general.
From remote times the practice of illustrating texts by means of pictorial representations was in vogue. The survival of papyrus rolls containing the text of the Egyptian ritual known as The Book of the Dead, dating back Early. fifteen centuries B.C., and accompanied with numerous scenes painted in brilliant colours, proves how ancient was this very natural method of elucidating a written text by means of pictures. There are many passages in the writings of Latin authors showing that illustrated books were not uncommon in Rome at least in the early period of the empire; and the oldest extant paintings in ancient classical MSS. may with little hesitation be accepted as representative of the style of illustration which was practised very much earlier. But such paintings are rather illustrative than decorative, and the only strictly ornamental adjuncts are the frames in which they are set. Yet independent decoration appears in a primitive form in the papyri and the earliest vellum MSS. At the head or at the end of the text designs composed of cross-hatchings, cables, dotted patterns and scrolls, sometimes with birds or simple domestic objects, are found. The early practice of writing the initial lines or even the entire text of a volume in gold or coloured inks, and of staining with purple and of gilding the vellum, while it undoubtedly enhanced the decorative aspect, does not properly fall within the scope of this article; it concerns the material rather than the artistic element of the MS. (See [Manuscripts], [Palaeography].)
It will be seen, then, that in the earliest examples of book decorations we find the germs of the two lines on which that decoration was destined to develop in the illuminated MSS. of the middle ages: the illustrative picture was the precursor of the medieval miniature (the technical term for a picture in an illuminated MS.); and the independent simple ornament was to expand into the brilliant initial letters and borders of illumination. And yet, while the miniature has a career of its own in artistic development which may be more conveniently dealt with under a separate heading (see [Miniature]), its decorative qualities are so closely bound up with those of the initial and border that an historical description of illumination must give full recognition to its prominent position in the general scheme of book-ornamentation of the middle ages.
The first examples to come under consideration are the few surviving MSS. of early origin which, preserving as they do the classical tradition, form the connecting link between the art of the Roman empire and that of the middle ages. The most ancient of these, it is now agreed, is the fragmentary copy of the Iliad, on vellum, in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, which consists of cuttings of the coloured drawings with which the volume was adorned in illustration of the various scenes of the poem. The MS. may have been executed in Italy, and there is good reason to assign the fragments to the 3rd century. The character of the art is quite classical, bearing comparison with that of the wall-paintings of Pompeii and the catacombs. Equally classical in their style are the fifty illustrative pictures of the Vatican Virgil, known as the Schedae Vaticanae, of the 4th century; but in these we find an advance on the Homeric fragments in the direction of decoration, for gilt shading is here employed to heighten the lights, and the frames in which the pictures are set are ornamented with gilt lozenges. A second famous MS. of Virgil in the Vatican library is the Codex Romanus, a curious instance of rough and clumsy art, with its series of illustrations copied by an unskilful hand from earlier classical models. And a still later example of persistence of the classical tradition is seen in the long roll of the book of Joshua, also in the Vatican, perhaps of the 10th century, which is filled with a series of outline drawings of considerable merit, copied from an earlier MS. But all such MSS. exhibit little tendency to decoration, and if the book ornamentation of the early middle ages had been practised only in the western empire and not also at Constantinople, it is very doubtful if the brilliant illumination which was afterwards developed would have ever existed.
Plate I.
| THE LINDISFARNE GOSPELS.—ABOUT A.D. 700. (British Museum. Cotton MS., Nero D. iv. f. 211.) |
When the centre of government passed eastward, Roman art came under Oriental influence with its sense of splendour, and developed the style known as Byzantine which, in its earlier stages, and until it became stereotyped in Byzantine. character, was broad in its drawing, on classical lines, and brilliant in its colouring, and which introduced a profuse application of gold in the details of ornament. Reacting on the art of the west, the influence of the Byzantine or Greek school is not only prominent in such early works as the mosaics of Ravenna, but it has also left its mark in the peculiar character of Italian pictorial art of the middle ages.
Very few examples of early Byzantine work in MSS. have survived; but two fragmentary leaves (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 5111) of tables of the Eusebian canons, which must have stood at the beginning of a copy of the Gospels, executed no doubt in the Eastern capital in the 6th century, are sufficient to exemplify the splendour of ornament which might be lavished on book decoration at that date. The surface of the vellum is entirely gilt, and the ornamental designs are in classical style and painted in bright colours. Two well-known MSS., the Genesis of the Imperial Library of Vienna, of the latter part of the 6th century, and the Gospels of Rossano in southern Italy, of the same period, both containing series of illustrative paintings of a semi-classical type, are very interesting specimens of Byzantine art; but they depend on their purple vellum and their silver-written texts to claim a place among highly ornamented MSS., for the paintings themselves are devoid of gold. On the other hand, the Greek MS. of Genesis, of the 5th or 6th century, which once formed part of the Cottonian collection in the British Museum, but which was almost totally destroyed by fire, was of a more artistic character: the drawing of its miniatures was of great merit and classical in style, and gold shading was largely employed in the details. The famous MS. of Dioscorides at Vienna, executed in the year 472, is another excellent example of the early Byzantine school, its series of paintings at the beginning of the volume well maintaining the classical sentiment.