The difficulty which besets the modern book decorator, illustrator, or designer of printers' ornaments, of getting type which will harmonize properly with his designs, did not exist with the mediæval illuminator, who must always have been sure of balancing his designs by a body of text not only beautiful in the form of its individual letters, but beautiful and rich in the effect of its mass on the page, which was only enhanced when the initials were relieved with colour on gold, or beautiful pen work which grew out of them like the mistletoe from the solid oak stem.
The very pitch of perfection which penmanship, or the art of the calligrapher had reached in the fifteenth century, the calculated regularity and "purgation of superfluities" in the form of the letters, the squareness of their mass in the words, and approximation in length and height, seem to suggest and naturally lead up to the idea of the movable type and the printed page.
Before, however, turning the next page of our subject, let us take one more general and rapid glance at the MS. books from the point of view of design.
[Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.
"CHRONICA HUNGARIÆ." (AUGSBURG, RATDOLT, 1488.)]
While examples of the two fields into which art may be said to be always more or less divided--the imitative and the inventive, or the illustrative and the decorative--are not altogether absent in the books of the Middle Ages, the main tendency and prevailing spirit is decidedly on the inventive and decorative side, more especially in the work of the illuminators from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and yet this inventive and decorative spirit is often allied with a dramatic and poetic feeling, as well as a sense of humour. We see how full of life is the ornament of the illuminator, how figures, birds, animals, and insects fill his arabesques, how he is often decorator, illustrator, and pictorial commentator in one.
[Illustration: FRENCH SCHOOL. XVTH CENTURY.
INITIAL FROM "LA MER DES HISTOIRES." (PARIS, PIERRE LE ROUGE, 1488.)]
Even apart from his enrichments, it is evident that the page was regarded by the calligrapher as a space to be decorated--that it should at least, regarded solely as a page of text, be a page of beautiful writing, the mass carefully placed upon the vellum, so as to afford convenient and ample margin, especially beneath. The page of a book, in fact, may be regarded as a flat panel which may be variously spaced out. The calligrapher, the illuminator, and the miniaturist are the architects who planned out their vellum grounds and built beautiful structures of line and colour upon them for thought and fancy to dwell in. Sometimes the text is arranged in a single column, as generally in the earlier MSS.; sometimes in double, as generally in the Gothic and later MSS., and these square and oblong panels of close text are relieved by large and small initial letters sparkling in gold and colour, inclosed in their own framework, or escaping from it in free and varied branch work and foliation upon the margin, and set with miniatures like gems, as in the Bedford Hours, the larger initials increasing to such proportions as to inclose a more important miniature--a subject-picture in short--a book illustration in the fullest sense, yet strictly a part of a general scheme of the ornamentation of the page.