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A matter of opinion
Nov. 26th, 2025 11:16 amMy late father used to drive me mad sometimes, and one of the ways in which he did that was by his apparent inability to comprehend the idea that anything could be subjective. He was, in his own eyes, the final arbiter of taste, and anything he personally didn't like (or thought he wouldn't like) was automatically "rubbish". There was no nuance there at all. He couldn't get his head round the fact that, while I don't especially like Beethoven myself, I can still appreciate that he was a great composer, and that in fact I much prefer Bach. No, in his black and white world, you liked Beethoven or there was something wrong with you, and Bach was somehow objectively boring.
Last night I bought an e-book which reminded me of him very much. It was a book on manuscript illumination; there was no blurb about it, but on the other hand the site was selling it at better than half price, so I decided I didn't mind risking £3. And it turned out to be 19th century. I don't know how familiar you are with 19th century textbooks, but they are quite often hilariously opinionated, and this one was a truly spectacular example of that. My dad had a few bees in his bonnet; this author had an entire hive. He had clearly written the book not merely to teach illumination (which I don't think the book does very well, but it does have an extensive appendix containing enough useful reference designs to justify its price), but also - and, quite possibly, even more importantly - to hammer his pet theory into the head of every reader. This pet theory was that illumination reached its peak in the 13th and 14th centuries, and everything done after that was at best "debased" and at worst actually "evil". (I mean. Seriously?!)
It's on every page. The adjectives pile up. We hear continually about the simplicity, beauty, purity, and so forth of the 13th and 14th century styles, and even more about how terrible the later styles are in comparison. The author is positively scathing about the increased amount of gold used in later MSS, deprecating it as "tinselly" and "vulgar", and if there isn't enough text on a page for him he criticises the results as "mere picture-books" (because for some reason everyone knows that picture-books are Bad and Wrong, I suppose). After several pages of this diatribe, the reader - well, this reader, at any rate - is inevitably overtaken by a desire to go and study some good 15th and 16th century MSS, on the grounds that if this writer felt he had to put so much time and energy into knocking them, there can't possibly be anything obviously wrong with them.
Anyway. I re-checked the rules for the scroll blank competition (turns out I made a mistake yesterday; 160 gsm perg would not have been acceptable after all), and they want historical documentation. Whoops. This piece is mostly out of my own head, apart from the Evangelist symbols. So I did some research, and it turns out that my current piece would actually fit best in the 15th century. Both Celtic knotwork and the Evangelist symbols were used throughout the history of illumination, but my references for the latter came from a 15th-century stained-glass window, and also my colour scheme is no earlier than the 15th century. I have used a lot of green; earlier illumination majored heavily on blue, purple, and scarlet (like the decorations in the Tabernacle, which may have been the inspiration behind that colour scheme), and any stems and leaves tended to be worked in pink or lilac. Very little green was used. More naturalistic colouring came later, but apparently was not favoured by the author of this book, despite his flat assertion that "all beauty without exception is derived from nature".
Well... I like green. So it looks as if all my illumination is going to be, in effect, later-period, regardless of the actual style.
This shouldn't amuse me as much as it does.
Last night I bought an e-book which reminded me of him very much. It was a book on manuscript illumination; there was no blurb about it, but on the other hand the site was selling it at better than half price, so I decided I didn't mind risking £3. And it turned out to be 19th century. I don't know how familiar you are with 19th century textbooks, but they are quite often hilariously opinionated, and this one was a truly spectacular example of that. My dad had a few bees in his bonnet; this author had an entire hive. He had clearly written the book not merely to teach illumination (which I don't think the book does very well, but it does have an extensive appendix containing enough useful reference designs to justify its price), but also - and, quite possibly, even more importantly - to hammer his pet theory into the head of every reader. This pet theory was that illumination reached its peak in the 13th and 14th centuries, and everything done after that was at best "debased" and at worst actually "evil". (I mean. Seriously?!)
It's on every page. The adjectives pile up. We hear continually about the simplicity, beauty, purity, and so forth of the 13th and 14th century styles, and even more about how terrible the later styles are in comparison. The author is positively scathing about the increased amount of gold used in later MSS, deprecating it as "tinselly" and "vulgar", and if there isn't enough text on a page for him he criticises the results as "mere picture-books" (because for some reason everyone knows that picture-books are Bad and Wrong, I suppose). After several pages of this diatribe, the reader - well, this reader, at any rate - is inevitably overtaken by a desire to go and study some good 15th and 16th century MSS, on the grounds that if this writer felt he had to put so much time and energy into knocking them, there can't possibly be anything obviously wrong with them.
Anyway. I re-checked the rules for the scroll blank competition (turns out I made a mistake yesterday; 160 gsm perg would not have been acceptable after all), and they want historical documentation. Whoops. This piece is mostly out of my own head, apart from the Evangelist symbols. So I did some research, and it turns out that my current piece would actually fit best in the 15th century. Both Celtic knotwork and the Evangelist symbols were used throughout the history of illumination, but my references for the latter came from a 15th-century stained-glass window, and also my colour scheme is no earlier than the 15th century. I have used a lot of green; earlier illumination majored heavily on blue, purple, and scarlet (like the decorations in the Tabernacle, which may have been the inspiration behind that colour scheme), and any stems and leaves tended to be worked in pink or lilac. Very little green was used. More naturalistic colouring came later, but apparently was not favoured by the author of this book, despite his flat assertion that "all beauty without exception is derived from nature".
Well... I like green. So it looks as if all my illumination is going to be, in effect, later-period, regardless of the actual style.
This shouldn't amuse me as much as it does.
