The Art of Reading: Image and Text in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books

Illuminations versus Illustrations

Medieval manuscripts often contained illuminations--small illustrations related to the text of the book. "Small" can be a relative term; illuminations can range in size (in proportion to the page) from a tiny image somewhere on the page to a full page image. However, the introduction of printing led to the decline of illumination. Early printed books used woodcuts, but the conventions guiding the placement of these illustrations continued with the printing of religious texts. But since the introduction of printing also allowed for a proliferation of many new kinds of texts, the concept of "illustration" changed dramatically.

Up to about 1450, manuscript illumination was arguably the main vehicle for painting in Europe. Workshops in cities like Paris, or scriptoria in monasteries, continued to produce commissioned religious texts containing miniatures of all shapes and sizes. Monastic scriptoria, in particular, continued to produce books of hours, psalters, breviaries, and pontificals that were filled with beautiful examples of the work of skilled painters. With the advent of printing, many of these painters went to work for printers to continue the adornment of books with initials and frontispieces, and the occasional miniature, or to hand color woodcuts in the new, printed versions of these texts. It can be argued that the transition from manuscript to print was one of the reasons for the growth in panel painting in the second half of the 15th century, especially in Northern Europe, as the practice of illuminating printed books began to wane. 

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