Hand-painted books produced in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages are dazzingly inventive, widely admired both in their own time and today. The makers of Flemish illuminated manuscripts experimented, sometimes flamboyantly, with all aspects of their design, manipulating elements of their format, layout, script, decoration and illustration in radically new and challenging ways. In this book, James H. Marrow discusses prominent features of many of the most exuberant illuminated manuscripts created by leading Flemish illuminators of the 15th and the 16th centuries, considering both the playful ways in which the makers of these books reconfigured their design and the ways they exploited these innovations to define and convey the meaning of their contents more effectively. Marrow considers how the designers of these manuscripts broke down the barriers between the different components of the book; how the shapes of some manuscripts became a kind of image; how script sometimes became decoration or one of several illusionistically treated elements or fields on the page; and how decoration and illustration were intermixed in diverse, witty, and provocative fashions. In this final stage in the evolution of the medieval book, leading Flemish illuminators fundamentally changed the structural dynamics of the page, enlarging its fields of visual and pictorial interest and exploiting novel juxtapositions of subject matter and scale, of viewpoint and different kinds of illusionism, to guide viewers beyond the here-and-now, to evoke multiple and alternative levels of truth, and to effect profound transformations of understanding. This is an incisive study of the course of these developments in the Low Countries and of some of the important ways in which they engaged issues central to the function of the visual arts.

Cet ouvrage constitue la première étude systématique consacrée aux manuscrits enluminés à Tournai dans les années 1380-1430, cinq décennies au cours desquelles la vile joua un rôle-clé dans l'histoire de la peinture occidentale. C'est dans ces années de transition que Robert Campin, peintre actif à Tournai, révolutionna la peinture courtoise du gothique finissant et posa, avec Jan Van Eyck, les fondements de la Renaissance septentrionale.Si la peinture sur panneau « campinienne » a fait l'objet de nombreuses études, la miniature, en revanche était restée un parent pauvre de l'histoire de l'art tournaisien. La présente monographie tente de combler ce manque. Autour d'un missel documenté, attribuable au miniaturiste Jean Semont (décédé vers 1419), un important groupe d'une trentaine de manuscrits, peu connus pour la plupart, donne des informations vitales sur la production et la réception des littératures profane et religieuse dans la Cité des cinq clochers. Loin de se limiter aux habituels livres liturgiques et ouvrages de dévotion, il comporte aussi plusieurs romans, des traités didactiques, philosophiques ou théologiques, tous enluminés. Son examen approfondi jette un éclairage neuf sur le bouillonnement intellectuel et artistique qui régnait dans la ville scaldienne au tournant des XIVe et XVe siècles et sur son rayonnement. Siège d'un important diocèse et tête de pont française en territoires bourguignons, elle a pu servir de plaque tournante dans le réseau d'influences croisées tissé entre les deux grands centres de production qu'étaient à l'époque Paris et la Flandre.De toute évidence, le milieu artistique tournaisien connaît une grande vitalité jusque vers 1430. Au moment même où prospèrent les enlumineurs, les compagnies littéraires ou les ateliers de sculpture, la peinture sur panneau, autour de Robert Campin, connaît un essor sans précédent. Se pose la question délicate des rapports du célèbre peintre avec la miniature. Trois folios enluminés, détachés d'un somptueux livre de prières destiné à une dame de l'aristocratie tournaisienne, sont sans doute l'oeuvre d'un enlimeur au talent exceptionnel, actif dans l'entourage direct du peintre.Riche de près de 450 illustrations, la plupart en couleur, l'étude est complétée de cartes, d'un catalogue des manuscrits, d'une étude de calendrier et de l'usage liturgique de Tournai. Elle est munie d'index qui en font un ouvrage de référence incontournable sur l'art tournaisien des années 1400.

In the Middle Ages, writing conveyed far more than information. In contradistinction to the modern separation of image and text and, by implication, form and content, which was reified with the invention of printing, illuminated manuscripts made images out of words. In consonance with Christian doctrine, which declared that the Word had become flesh, letters painted on parchment assumed bodily presence to create effects of power and persuasion. Painted letters elicited modes of performance, oral recitation and ritual action. Far from calligraphic ornament or a medium with prescribed boundaries, medieval lettering reveals itself as a flexible instrument in which various categories of human experience and expression -- the audible, the visible, the symbolic and the figurative -- come together. Among the topics touched on by this book are display scripts, monograms, nomina sacra and carmina figurata, epigraphic inscriptions, chrysography and color, speech scrolls, relationships among author, scribe and artist as expressed through scripts, the anthropomorphic dimensions of abstract lettering, and the impact of iconic scripts on the reader.

Following the newest procedures of the "archaeology of the book", this catalogue raisonné presents a detailed description of the Coptic holdings of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The first efforts to provide such a catalogue date back to the twenties and thirties of this century. The introduction includes chapters on the modern history of the Coptic manuscripts, their antiquity and provenance, the method employed in this catalogue to describe them, and the history of the ancient monastery of St. Michael near present-day Hamuli, whose library yielded the bulk of the Morgan Coptic collection. In the individual entries, the literary contents of the manuscripts are treated at length and secondary literature, including modern editions and translations, is listed. Extensive concordances facilitate the use of the catalogue.

This album of photographic plates is a companion volume to the descriptive Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It presents a visual record of the Morgan Coptic collection. The Morgan Coptic collection is unrivaled in wealth of Coptic manuscript illumination dating to before AD 1000, including a near monopoly on early Coptic frontispieces.Following a brief introduction and a few images of the desert location near the town of al-Hamuli, where the bulk of the Library's Coptic manuscripts were unearthed in 1910, the body of the album presents the collection for codicologists, art historians, and paleographers under the two categories of Decoration and Script.The album contains a comprehensive record of frontispieces, headpieces, tailpieces (including what may be the oldest Christian illumination), a sampling of marginal ornaments and ornamental initials, specimens of the scripts of most literary manuscripts, and selected documentary texts and bindings. Full concordances between call numbers, plate numbers, and catalogue numbers are also provided.

Hand-painted books produced in the Low Countries during the late Middle Ages are dazzingly inventive, widely admired both in their own time and today. The makers of Flemish illuminated manuscripts experimented, sometimes flamboyantly, with all aspects of their design, manipulating elements of their format, layout, script, decoration and illustration in radically new and challenging ways. In this book, James H. Marrow discusses prominent features of many of the most exuberant illuminated manuscripts created by leading Flemish illuminators of the 15th and the 16th centuries, considering both the playful ways in which the makers of these books reconfigured their design and the ways they exploited these innovations to define and convey the meaning of their contents more effectively. Marrow considers how the designers of these manuscripts broke down the barriers between the different components of the book; how the shapes of some manuscripts became a kind of image; how script sometimes became decoration or one of several illusionistically treated elements or fields on the page; and how decoration and illustration were intermixed in diverse, witty, and provocative fashions. In this final stage in the evolution of the medieval book, leading Flemish illuminators fundamentally changed the structural dynamics of the page, enlarging its fields of visual and pictorial interest and exploiting novel juxtapositions of subject matter and scale, of viewpoint and different kinds of illusionism, to guide viewers beyond the here-and-now, to evoke multiple and alternative levels of truth, and to effect profound transformations of understanding. This is an incisive study of the course of these developments in the Low Countries and of some of the important ways in which they engaged issues central to the function of the visual arts.

Cet ouvrage constitue la première étude systématique consacrée aux manuscrits enluminés à Tournai dans les années 1380-1430, cinq décennies au cours desquelles la vile joua un rôle-clé dans l'histoire de la peinture occidentale. C'est dans ces années de transition que Robert Campin, peintre actif à Tournai, révolutionna la peinture courtoise du gothique finissant et posa, avec Jan Van Eyck, les fondements de la Renaissance septentrionale.Si la peinture sur panneau « campinienne » a fait l'objet de nombreuses études, la miniature, en revanche était restée un parent pauvre de l'histoire de l'art tournaisien. La présente monographie tente de combler ce manque. Autour d'un missel documenté, attribuable au miniaturiste Jean Semont (décédé vers 1419), un important groupe d'une trentaine de manuscrits, peu connus pour la plupart, donne des informations vitales sur la production et la réception des littératures profane et religieuse dans la Cité des cinq clochers. Loin de se limiter aux habituels livres liturgiques et ouvrages de dévotion, il comporte aussi plusieurs romans, des traités didactiques, philosophiques ou théologiques, tous enluminés. Son examen approfondi jette un éclairage neuf sur le bouillonnement intellectuel et artistique qui régnait dans la ville scaldienne au tournant des XIVe et XVe siècles et sur son rayonnement. Siège d'un important diocèse et tête de pont française en territoires bourguignons, elle a pu servir de plaque tournante dans le réseau d'influences croisées tissé entre les deux grands centres de production qu'étaient à l'époque Paris et la Flandre.De toute évidence, le milieu artistique tournaisien connaît une grande vitalité jusque vers 1430. Au moment même où prospèrent les enlumineurs, les compagnies littéraires ou les ateliers de sculpture, la peinture sur panneau, autour de Robert Campin, connaît un essor sans précédent. Se pose la question délicate des rapports du célèbre peintre avec la miniature. Trois folios enluminés, détachés d'un somptueux livre de prières destiné à une dame de l'aristocratie tournaisienne, sont sans doute l'oeuvre d'un enlimeur au talent exceptionnel, actif dans l'entourage direct du peintre.Riche de près de 450 illustrations, la plupart en couleur, l'étude est complétée de cartes, d'un catalogue des manuscrits, d'une étude de calendrier et de l'usage liturgique de Tournai. Elle est munie d'index qui en font un ouvrage de référence incontournable sur l'art tournaisien des années 1400.

In the Middle Ages, writing conveyed far more than information. In contradistinction to the modern separation of image and text and, by implication, form and content, which was reified with the invention of printing, illuminated manuscripts made images out of words. In consonance with Christian doctrine, which declared that the Word had become flesh, letters painted on parchment assumed bodily presence to create effects of power and persuasion. Painted letters elicited modes of performance, oral recitation and ritual action. Far from calligraphic ornament or a medium with prescribed boundaries, medieval lettering reveals itself as a flexible instrument in which various categories of human experience and expression -- the audible, the visible, the symbolic and the figurative -- come together. Among the topics touched on by this book are display scripts, monograms, nomina sacra and carmina figurata, epigraphic inscriptions, chrysography and color, speech scrolls, relationships among author, scribe and artist as expressed through scripts, the anthropomorphic dimensions of abstract lettering, and the impact of iconic scripts on the reader.

Following the newest procedures of the "archaeology of the book", this catalogue raisonné presents a detailed description of the Coptic holdings of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The first efforts to provide such a catalogue date back to the twenties and thirties of this century. The introduction includes chapters on the modern history of the Coptic manuscripts, their antiquity and provenance, the method employed in this catalogue to describe them, and the history of the ancient monastery of St. Michael near present-day Hamuli, whose library yielded the bulk of the Morgan Coptic collection. In the individual entries, the literary contents of the manuscripts are treated at length and secondary literature, including modern editions and translations, is listed. Extensive concordances facilitate the use of the catalogue.

This album of photographic plates is a companion volume to the descriptive Catalogue of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. It presents a visual record of the Morgan Coptic collection. The Morgan Coptic collection is unrivaled in wealth of Coptic manuscript illumination dating to before AD 1000, including a near monopoly on early Coptic frontispieces.Following a brief introduction and a few images of the desert location near the town of al-Hamuli, where the bulk of the Library's Coptic manuscripts were unearthed in 1910, the body of the album presents the collection for codicologists, art historians, and paleographers under the two categories of Decoration and Script.The album contains a comprehensive record of frontispieces, headpieces, tailpieces (including what may be the oldest Christian illumination), a sampling of marginal ornaments and ornamental initials, specimens of the scripts of most literary manuscripts, and selected documentary texts and bindings. Full concordances between call numbers, plate numbers, and catalogue numbers are also provided.