Most importantly the use of egg yolk, as well as the more usual egg white and gum as a binding agent, particularly when using red lead as a pigment, can now be detected.Ĭhapters which address the alchemical significance of colour, its meanings and the theory of optics act as a balance to the more technical observations and ensure that this book will be a standard point of reference for many years to come. It is now possible, for instance, to confirm that Venetian illuminators utilised smalt (ground blue glass) as a colour, and that the shift from verdigris green to malachite green can be documented statistically and had occurred by the end of the 14th century. This has enabled the known documentary sources for methods, materials and techniques of illumination to be confirmed, but it also reveals changing patterns of preference and local practices. The project has brought together scholars and conservators from many countries, and its protocols develop the principles of codicological research championed by Delaissé by expanding the traditional areas of investigation to include scientific analysis. It is the product of the Cambridge Miniare project, which is dedicated to the non-invasive scientific analysis of illuminated manuscripts. This catalogue provides a welcome boost to manuscript scholarship in this area. The study of illuminated manuscripts has in some ways lagged behind in the field of scientific investigation of materials and techniques, an area where monumental painting on wall, panel and canvas progressed quickly through the utilisation of technological breakthroughs.
In this respect the first of the catalogues, Colour, which commemorates the exhibition held last year at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, is part of this continuity.
In this way information is teased out that is not otherwise evident and that may not relate to the apparent purpose of the book. It treats the manuscript or incunable (the object) as the text, be it from the point of view of the sewing of the binding or the decisions made about which pictures to include in, let us say, a Bible. This almost Foucauldian technique has dominated manuscript studies for the past half century. It could even be said to have acted as a precursor to the development of new strategies for investigating works of art in the same way that Hanns Swarzenzki’s extraordinary (and largely textless book) Monuments of Romanesque Art (1954) allowed the material culture of the past to speak through binary opposition to create a dialogue between the viewer and the object. This approach complements the work of the so-called French post-structuralists, in particular Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, in its search for evidence within the unwritten as well as the written text.
Both these media strive to create an information-based hyper-reality, but can never replace the intimate relationship between a reader and a real manuscript or incunable (early printed book).ĭuring the 1950s the work of François Masai and Bob Delaissé established the interpretation of the book as an object through codicology-the study of the manuscript book from its parchment and script to the social and economic implications of its use, decoration and dissemination.
All of them build on a recent history of the study of illuminated manuscripts that has grown in momentum in tandem with the age of post-analogue reproduction to become the world of the modern facsimile and digital database. Three are catalogues and represent the collaborative effort of a large number of scholars, curators, conservators and scientists two are demonstrations of personal erudition gained after a lifetime of meticulous and ground-breaking investigation and one is a traditional coffee-table book. These six books carry a considerable weight of scholarship, which also amounts to a 15kg load over nearly half a metre of bookshelf.
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