Bernard Quaritch

“ In the ninth century England and central France were easily ahead of all the other barbarian states. In Germany, in Aquitaine, in Spain, and in Northern Italy, the same system was followed, but with a prevailing stamp of barbarism, especially in the design of the human figure, which affords a striking contrast to the refined luxury of Carolingian art and the more sober splendour of English work. ”

“ The particular merit of the Irish is that they seem to have developed (out of Roman semi-uncials) a handsome minuscule form of writing earlier than any other people. The cursive of the Romans had always been an ugly and ill-decipherable script; and it was only in the seventh century that even the Italians, under barbarian pressure, evolved a fairly good readable minuscule. The minuscules of Gaul and Western Germany, called Merowingian, were still in a formless and primitive rudeness at the time when the Irish had already attained the elegance of practised penmanship. ”

“ The study of manuscripts, for most persons, is confined to the period between the twelfth century and the sixteenth; since it is not given to everyone to make pilgrimages to the museums scattered over Europe, for the purpose of looking at the earlier and rarer examples of writing. Besides, the chief interest of the study lies rather in the decoration than the calligraphy of manuscripts; and it was not till the fourteenth century that the production of such work became so large and general as to leave a sufficient number of specimens readily accessible to modern inspection. ”

“ It was really this English phase of decorative art which blossomed into Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century.
The French schools were still Carolingian and splendid, but their pre-eminence was not maintained after the breaking up of the empire of Charles the Great. The revolutions of the ninth century led to the making of nations. France ceased to be the Gallo-Roman province of a Frankish monarchy. A French language and a French nation emerged into existence in the tenth century, but the grand ornamental and calligraphic work of the Franco-Gallic time was no longer equalled. ”

“ It was in the dainty adornment of their illuminated MSS., and in the fine and delicate beauty of the pictorial designs, that the French school now assumed its place of pre-eminence. The Apocalypse was a favourite book in the first half of this century, as it had been in the twelfth, and artists delighted in drawing pictures of its strange visions. These pictures were seldom quite original in design, since the earliest delineations had acquired a sort of traditional authority, but they were sufficiently variant in particulars to exhibit the strength of the artist. ”

“ Of the Visigoths who had preceded the Ostrogoths in Italy, but gone onward thence to fix their rule in Southern Gaul and Spain, we have nothing to show that they ever made use of the Ulphilan alphabet. Their coins of the sixth and seventh centuries bear inscriptions in debased Roman capitals; and the so-called Visigothic writing in manuscripts of the eighth to the twelfth centuries is simply Spanish-Roman. The use, in modern times, of the word Gothic to indicate special forms of writing and architecture is very absurd, but the phrase has become convenient. ”

“ It was the wealth of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels which attracted talent to a warmer air in which it could grow and flourish, on the border land between the Celt and the Teuton, with all the advantages derivable from either side. In the same way the riches and luxury of Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Verona, Cremona, Padua, stimulated the faculties of men who had inherited the traditions of Græco-Roman art. It was a brilliant autumn in the annals of illumination, but a short one, by reason of the changes which the new art of Printing had brought about in all things. ”

“ When with the tenth century France and Germany emerged as two distinct nations from the chaos of the Frankish empire, their modes of book-decoration began to diverge. The rudeness of an earlier time remains, with a good deal of spirit, in the illustrative designs produced in Germany; the beauty of French work began to decay, while the English was at its best. Winchester, Canterbury, and Glastonbury were the real centres of English art at the middle of the tenth century; the Norsemen having destroyed the Anglo-Irish monasteries in the north. ”

“ In the fourteenth century a beautiful square gothic letter was in use in Italy, and remained unaltered in form till the end of the fifteenth; but it was not unaccompanied by various other styles of writing. The Italic was still in its primitive stage without elegance, and some books were written in a gothic letter derived from French and German models, and quite unlike the square Italian gothic. The script of the book, from which a facsimile is given on plate 12, is an example of this outlandishness. Before the fifteenth century arrived the cursive hand had split into its two branches. ”

“ The most remarkable part of the change was the exclusion of the th letter from the script of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This tendency, which had for centuries been in growth, had the remarkable effect of practically confining the old Norse literature to Iceland, and of making it the apparent home of all the poems and Sagas which Norway had produced. It was at least the home of most of the literary men who in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries wrote for the delight of their kinsmen, in both Norway and Iceland. ”

“ As to the cuneiform inscriptions, the various Semitic tongues furnished means of comparison for Assyrian texts, the Persian and "Zend" for old Persic and Median, and certain cuneiform vocabularies were discovered which rendered it possible to understand a third language, the most ancient of them all, which had been utterly unknown even by name. From the time of Christ, perhaps even before it, down to sixty years ago, the languages and monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa had never been looked upon by the eye of intelligence. The mystery of ages is a mystery no more. ”

“ The Frankish monarchy was so widely extended throughout the territories stretching from the Loire to the Main, and along the whole course of the Rhine from south to north, even in "Merovingian" times, that the use of the word to designate a special style of writing is hardly desirable. It is probable enough that in the seventh century and the early part of the eighth a kind of uniformity existed in the writing used in all the region between Paris and Mentz, but it was nothing else than Roman uncials, semiuncials, and minuscules written in more or less cramped and graceless fashion ”

“ The quantity of gold that gave magnificence to the work of the miniaturist in Flanders and France in the last quarter of the fifteenth century became excessive. It was a relief to the eye when this blaze of gold receded before the outcome of late Flemish art. Scarcely any school produced work comparable for delicacy and truth to the miniatures painted in prayerbooks at Bruges and Ghent between 1490 and 1520. ”

“ Venetian examples of such miniatures are remarkably beautiful—the beauty mingled with a certain gravity of manner; those which are of Roman origin have an air of masterly splendour; but those which were produced at Florence between 1480 and 1510 are so lovely as to upset our critical judgment in comparing them with work done at Bruges. In the border-illustration there never was any resemblance between the work of Italy and that of other countries, and there can be no hesitation in deciding between them in favour of Italy as more appropriately decorative. ”

“ The miniatures are good, but not excellent; better in composition than in design, and showing grave deficiencies with regard to perspective. They are, however, well executed and well painted; and the borders are remarkably elegant. The conventional large foliage, of architectonic character, is admirably disposed upon small and appropriate fields of gold; and the twining branchlets that bear tiny buds and small leaves and flowers are not so crowded as to hide the vellum ground. The border is indeed a fine decorative composition, without a fault, and thoroughly English in style. ”

“ They delight the eye with a fuller satisfaction than even the best of the Flemish illuminations. The latter we examine carefully, with a continual increase of admiration; while we enjoy the harmonious beauty of the Florentine, we feel that the critic's functions are set aside.
The writing of the late Italian MSS., among which classical texts rival the books of prayers in the elegance of their adornment, was more frequently Roman than gothic, but a fine black-letter hand survived into the sixteenth century, especially at Venice. ”

“ Sentimental writers have been, from time immemorial, in the habit of scouting at wealth and of pouring enthusiastic praise upon penury, as though the two conditions were equivalent to vice and virtue in morals, to dulness and genius in intellect. It is quite true that an impoverished state of society produces better poetry than a rich one; but it is equally true that the finest artistic work is born amid luxurious surroundings. ”

“ The English, the French, the German, the Spanish, and the Italian, had all certain qualities in common, but the first two were most nearly akin. The other three schools produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries books containing pictures, in which the composition is more remarkable than the drawing, and the painting is full of barbaric contrasts of colour. At all times, fine work was to be found in Italy, but only in isolated examples, and Italy as a whole underwent the same barbarisation as the other countries. From that stage the English and the French were the first to emerge. ”

“ He did not know, as we do, that the climate of Scandinavia must have been at that time much more severe than now, and that the population of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark cannot have reached in the fourth and fifth centuries to anything like its present numbers. The movements of that age, which carried millions of warriors to Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Africa, represented a wave of emigration, caused by an overflow of population, beginning in the far East, on the confines of China, of which the typical originators, so far as Europe is concerned, were the Huns. ”

“ It is sufficient glory for them to have converted the artistic movement of the time into a national school of painting unmistakable with any other, at a time when the calligraphical schools of central and Southern France, under an enlightened Frankish emperor, and with far superior opportunities, were labouring for a Gallo-Roman renaissance. ”

“ The Western Germans had nothing to do with writing till they conquered the Welshmen of Gaul. Consequently, we proceed to the Gothic alphabet.
After repeated attacks on the Roman empire in the third century, and repeated defeats, the Goths had extended their seats southwards, and were resident, in a partly Christianised state, in the lands north and south of the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been born in Cappadocia, a man of great ability, who was able to preach in Gothic, in Greek, and in Latin, thought the time had come to Christianise his countrymen completely. ”

“ The real origin of the artistic decoration is unmistakable. It is what we call Byzantine, but ought rather to be called Ægypto-Grecian. The people of Abyssinia, who were mainly Southern Arabs or Sabæans, received their instruction in art along with their Christianity a few centuries after the beginning of the era, and they have never abandoned them. As for the writing which appears on the plate, it is in the old Geez or Ethiopic language, and descended from that of the Sabæan people whose monumental inscriptions in Himyaritic language and characters are now attracting considerable interest. ”

“ Of the various species of national writing which were evolved from Roman calligraphy, and which, from the seventh century onwards, are divided by palæographers into Lombardic and Visigothic, Frankish (Merowingian) , and Irish (Hibernian and Anglo-Saxon) , the Irish was probably the first to attain a distinct type of its own. There would be inherent probability in the notion that the Irish alphabet and the Irish style of ornament were created in Britain and transferred to Ireland in the fifth century when the English arrived. ”

“ In fact the English school of that century was the parent of nearly all the art of the following century. Both in calligraphy and in pictorial designs, it forestalled the work done in the whole of Western Europe between 1200 and 1300, which has rendered the thirteenth century the most noteworthy in the history of illustrated MSS. The mode and style of drawing, unfinished by illumination, which were practised in England towards the close of the thirteenth century, may be examined in plate 10. Italian work of the same time is shown in plate 11 to have been much more barbaric and unskilful. ”