An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers and liturgical books such as psalters and courtly literature, the practice continued into secular texts from the 13th century onward and typically include proclamations, enrolled bills, laws, charters, inventories, and deeds.

The earliest surviving illuminated manuscripts are a small number from late antiquity, and date from between 400 and 600 CE. Examples include the Vergilius Romanus, Vergilius Vaticanus, and the Rossano Gospels. The majority of extant manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, although many survive from the Renaissance. While Islamic manuscripts can also be called illuminated and use essentially the same techniques, comparable Far Eastern and Mesoamerican works are described as painted.

Most manuscripts, illuminated or not, were written on parchment until the 2nd century BCE, when a more refined material called vellum, made from stretched calf skin, was supposedly introduced by King Eumenes II of Pergamum. This gradually became the standard for luxury illuminated manuscripts, although modern scholars are often reluctant to distinguish between parchment and vellum, and the skins of various animals might be used. The pages were then normally bound into codices (singular: codex), that is, the usual modern book format, although sometimes the older scroll format was used, for various reasons. A very few illuminated fragments also survive on papyrus. Books ranged in size from ones smaller than a modern paperback, such as the pocket gospel, to very large ones such as choirbooks for choirs to sing from, and Atlantic bibles, requiring more than one person to lift them.

Paper manuscripts appeared during the Late Middle Ages. The untypically early 11th century Missal of Silos is from Spain, near to Muslim paper manufacturing centres in Al-Andalus. Textual manuscripts on paper become increasingly common, but the more expensive parchment was mostly used for illuminated manuscripts until the end of the period. Very early printed books left spaces for red text, known as rubrics, miniature illustrations and illuminated initials, all of which would have been added later by hand. Drawings in the margins (known as marginalia) would also allow scribes to add their own notes, diagrams, translations, and even comic flourishes.

The introduction of printing rapidly led to the decline of illumination. Illuminated manuscripts continued to be produced in the early 16th century but in much smaller numbers, mostly for the very wealthy. They are among the most common items to survive from the Middle Ages; many thousands survive. They are also the best surviving specimens of medieval painting, and the best preserved. Indeed, for many areas and time periods, they are the only surviving examples of painting.

History

275px|thumb|The 63rd page of the Book of Hours (Use of Utrecht), –1465, ink, tempera, and gold on vellum, binding: brown Morocco over original wooden boards, overall: 59 × 116 mm, [[Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio, US)]]

Latin Europe

Art historians classify illuminated manuscripts into their historic periods and types, including (but not limited to) Late Antique, Insular, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance manuscripts. There are a few examples from later periods. Books that are heavily and richly illuminated are sometimes known as "display books" in church contexts, or "luxury manuscripts", especially if secular works. In the first millennium, these were most likely to be Gospel Books, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is the most widely recognized illuminated manuscript in the Anglosphere, and is famous for its insular designs. The Romanesque and Gothic periods saw the creation of many large illuminated complete bibles. The largest surviving example of these is The Codex Gigas in Sweden; it is so massive that it takes three librarians to lift it.

Other illuminated liturgical books appeared during and after the Romanesque period. These included psalters, which usually contained all 150 canonical psalms, and small, personal devotional books made for lay people known as books of hours that would separate one's day into eight hours of devotion. These were often richly illuminated with miniatures, decorated initials and floral borders. They were costly and therefore only owned by wealthy patrons, often women.

As the production of manuscripts shifted from monasteries to the public sector during the High Middle Ages, illuminated books began to reflect secular interests.

The Gothic period, which generally saw an increase in the production of illuminated books, also saw more secular works such as chronicles and works of literature illuminated. Wealthy people began to build up personal libraries; Philip the Bold probably had the largest personal library of his time in the mid-15th century, is estimated to have had about 600 illuminated manuscripts, whilst a number of his friends and relations had several dozen. Wealthy patrons, however, could have personal prayer books made especially for them, usually in the form of richly illuminated "books of hours", which set down prayers appropriate for various times in the liturgical day. One of the best known examples is the extravagant for a French prince.

275px|thumb|Illuminated manuscripts housed in the 16th-century [[Ethiopian Orthodox Church of Ura Kidane Mehret, Zege Peninsula, Lake Tana, Ethiopia]]

Up to the 12th century, most manuscripts were produced in monasteries in order to add to the library or after receiving a commission from a wealthy patron. Larger monasteries often contained separate areas for the monks who specialized in the production of manuscripts called a scriptorium. Within the walls of a scriptorium were individualized areas where a monk could sit and work on a manuscript without being disturbed by his fellow brethren. If no scriptorium was available, then "separate little rooms were assigned to book copying; they were situated in such a way that each scribe had to himself a window open to the cloister walk."

By the 14th century, the cloisters of monks writing in the scriptorium had almost fully given way to commercial urban scriptoria, especially in Paris, Rome and the Netherlands.]]

The Byzantine world produced manuscripts in its own style, versions of which spread to other Orthodox and Eastern Christian areas. This distinct Byzantine style of illumination had a characteristic color palette along with different ways of preparing pigments and ink and a unique finish to the vellum writing surface which was not as conducive to long term preservation as the more texture Western style. With their traditions of literacy uninterrupted by the Middle Ages, the Muslim world, especially on the Iberian Peninsula, was instrumental in delivering ancient classic works to the growing intellectual circles and universities of Western Europe throughout the 12th century. Books were produced there in large numbers and on paper for the first time in Europe, and with them full treatises on the sciences, especially astrology and medicine where illumination was required to have profuse and accurate representations with the text.

The origins of the pictorial tradition of Arabic illustrated manuscripts are uncertain. The first known decorated manuscripts are some Qur'ans from the 9th century. They were not illustrated, but were "illuminated" with decorations of the frontispieces or headings. The tradition of illustrated manuscripts started with the Graeco-Arabic translation movement and the creation of scientific and technical treatises often based on Greek scientific knowledge, such as the Arabic versions of The Book of Fixed Stars (965 CE), De materia medica or Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye. The translators were most often Arab Syriac Christians, such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq or Yahya ibn Adi, and their work is known to have been sponsored by local rulers, such as the Artuqids.

An explosion of artistic production in Arabic manuscripts occurred in the 12th and especially the 13th century. Thus various Syriac manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as Syriac Gospels, Vatican Library, Syr. 559 or Syriac Gospels, British Library, Add. 7170, were derived from the Byzantine tradition, yet stylistically have a lot in common with Islamic illustrated manuscripts such as the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, pointing to a common pictorial tradition that existed since circa 1180 in Syria and Iraq which was highly influenced by Byzantine art. Some of the illustrations of these manuscript have been characterized as "illustration byzantine traitée à la manière arabe" ("Byzantine illustration treated in the Arab style"). A number of works survive.

Some illustrations from the Middle Ages feature fantastic creatures—usually animal-headed humanoids, even when the depictions are quite clearly meant to be those of historical or mythological humans, known as zoocephalic figures. A well-known example is the Birds' Head Haggadah (Germany, circa 1300). Although it is theorized that zoocephalic art is to circumvent a prohibition of aniconism in Judaism, understood to prohibit idolatry, the fact that some manuscripts also include human faces casts doubt on this assumption. The reasons for this illustration style are not fully understood.

The Ambrosian Bible or Ambrosian Tanakh of 1236 by Jacob ben Samuel and Joseph ben Kalonymus is one of the earliest Ashkenazic illuminated manuscripts and biblical codices. It contains figural representation and depictions of biblical figures such as Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Joseph, Moses, Solomon, David and others. Some of the figures appear with faces obscured or zoocephalic. It was made for a patron probably from Ulm.

The Leipzig Mahzor also employs a zoocephalic method to depict humans. In the Frankish Empire, Carolingian minuscule emerged under the vast educational program of Charlemagne.

The first step was to send the manuscript to a rubricator, "who added (in red or other colors) the titles, headlines, the initials of chapters and sections, the notes and so on; and then – if the book was to be illustrated – it was sent to the illuminator".

The sturdy Roman letters of the early Middle Ages gradually gave way to scripts such as Uncial and half-Uncial, especially in the British Isles, where distinctive scripts such as insular majuscule and insular minuscule developed. Stocky, richly textured blackletter was first seen around the 13th century and was particularly popular in the later Middle Ages. Prior to the days of such careful planning, "A typical black-letter page of these Gothic years would show a page in which the lettering was cramped and crowded into a format dominated by huge ornamented capitals that descended from uncial forms or by illustrations". To prevent such poorly made manuscripts and illuminations from occurring, a script was typically supplied first, "and blank spaces were left for the decoration. This presupposes very careful planning by the scribe even before he put pen to parchment."

Engrossing: The process of illumination

thumb|A common process of manuscripts illumination from the creation of the quire to the binding

[[Image:Illumination_execution.gif|thumb|ENGROSSING<br />

I. Charcoal powder dots create the outline

II. Silverpoint drawing is sketched

III. Illustration is retraced with ink

IV. The surface is prepared for the application of gold leaf

V. Gold leaf is laid down

VI. Gold leaf is burnished to make it glossy and reflective

VII. Decorative impressions are made to adhere the leaf

VIII. Base colors are applied

IX. Darker tones are used to give volume

X. Further details are drawn

XI. Lighter colors are used to add particulars

XII. Ink borders are traced to finalize the illumination]]

thumb|A 13th-century manuscript illumination, the earliest known depiction of Archbishop [[Thomas Becket's assassination in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. British Library, London]]

The following steps outline the detailed labor involved to create the illuminations of one page of a manuscript:

  1. Silverpoint drawing of the design is executed
  2. Burnished gold dots are applied
  3. Application of modulating colors
  4. Continuation of previous three steps in addition to outlining marginal figures
  5. Penning of a rinceau appearing in the border of page
  6. Finally, marginal figures are painted

The illumination and decoration was normally planned at the inception of the work, and space reserved for it.

Marginalia ranged from intricate decorative illustrations to those considered extremely unusual. Some examples of marginalia found within medieval manuscripts included drawings of centaurs, snail and knight combat, warrior women, battles between cats and mice, parables from biblical texts, personified foxes, rabbits, and monkeys, and hidden words and messages buried within the border decorations. The added drawings and messages of the 13th to 14th centuries were typically devoted to recurring themes and often patterned after other types of popular medieval art such as stained-glass windows, stone carvings, and wall paintings.

{| class="wikitable"

|-

! Color

! Source(s)

|-

! Red

| Insect-based colors, including:

  • Carmine, also known as cochineal, where carminic acid from the Dactylopius coccus insect is mixed with an aluminum salt to produce the dye;
  • Crimson, also known as kermes, extracted from the insect Kermes vermilio; and
  • Lac, a scarlet resinous secretion of a number of species of insects.

Chemical- and mineral-based colors, including:

  • Red lead, chemically lead tetroxide, Pb<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub>, found in nature as the mineral minium, or made by heating white lead;
  • Vermilion, chemically mercury sulfide, HgS, and found in nature as the mineral cinnabar;
  • Rust, chemically hydrated ferric oxide, Fe<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub>·n H<sub>2</sub>O, or iron oxide-rich earth compounds.

The color red was often associated with imagery like blood, fire, and godly power. It was the most common and inexpensive color and as such was frequently used for initials, lettering, and borders and well as general imagery.

|-

!Pink

|

  • Brazilwood pink, a plant-based pigment extracted from the Asian tree Caesalpinia sappan.

Pink was considered a fashionable color and was often found in clothing depictions of aristocrats and in filigree detail work. Less expensive or poorer quality blue pigments were sometimes used for initials, lettering, and borders. By adding richness and depth to the manuscript, the use of gold in illuminations created pieces of art that are still valued today.

The application of gold leaf or dust to an illumination is a very detailed process that only the most skilled illuminators can undertake and successfully achieve. The first detail an illuminator considered when dealing with gold was whether to use gold leaf or specks of gold that could be applied with a brush. When working with gold leaf, the pieces would be hammered and thinned. Once the gold was soft and malleable in the water, it was ready to be applied to the page. Illuminators had to be very careful when applying gold leaf to the manuscript because gold leaf is able to "adhere to any pigment which had already been laid, ruining the design, and secondly the action of burnishing it is vigorous and runs the risk of smudging any painting already around it."

Patrons

At least in earlier periods, monasteries were the biggest manufacturers of illuminated manuscripts. They produced manuscripts for their own use; heavily illuminated ones tended to be reserved for liturgical use in the early period, while the monastery library held plainer texts. In the early period manuscripts were often commissioned by rulers for their own personal use or as diplomatic gifts, and many old manuscripts continued to be given in this way, even into the Early Modern period.