ART. – To the beauty of the characters and to the decorum with which they are arranged in the pages of ancient codices containing sacred texts, the orderly little fields of words, from the earliest times of the Christian faith, was added the value of illumination (q.v.).
Bibles (q.v.), Gospels (q.v.), Psalters (q.v.) were adorned with figurations intended to render the narrative of the events of the New and Old Testaments more intelligible.
In this field, the development and formal evolution of the codices corresponds to that of illumination itself. And it may be said that, in the oldest surviving examples (Quedlinburg Bible, Berlin, Royal Library, 4th century; Gospel Book, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College Library, cod. 286, late 6th century), the illuminations that adorn them reveal the same characteristics that were proper to painting in Italy at that time.
From the 6th century onward until the 9th, while in Italy painting and thus illumination slowly and laboriously evolved, the finest codices were produced within the orbit of Byzantine art, until the iconoclastic controversy also marked a halt in this field. In these Byzantine codices, however, a conception of page composition is evident that is not dissimilar to that of the ancients; that is, the illustration, the illumination, is intended as a complement that may or may not be inserted into the architecture of the page without necessarily forming an inseparable unity with the characters of the text.
In contrast to both our own and Byzantine codices is the manner in which the organic distribution of graphic and illustrative elements of the page is understood in codices composed in the British Isles. In these, a new and unified sense of decoration is present, not only in calligraphic forms but in the arrangement of the text on the pages, and above all in the large initials. These are illuminated, and the letters are formed with strange vermiform interlacings, foliage, monsters, anthropomorphic beings, etc., which, painted in gouache with vivid colors, twist and wind and intertwine with unpredictable logic within the clearly defined spaces. It is a taste that quickly spread, and whose reflections reached even the Byzantine workshops and Italian monasteries, where calligraphers and illuminators divided the labor in works of greater commitment, whereas in the earliest British codices, this work seems instead to have been executed by a single person.
The pre-Carolingian and Carolingian codices and others that derive characteristics from them (q.V. CAROLINGIAN, ART) perpetuate this taste for a unified sense of page decoration that tends toward ever greater clarity. From the Carolingian workshops emerged some codices that must be counted among the masterpieces of the most refined medieval taste.
In many of the codices composed in the monastery of Bobbio, a center of intense cultural exchanges with the regions of northern Europe, and in many of those produced in the Benedictine monasteries of southern Italy, particularly Montecassino, the way in which spaces are distributed on the pages, the importance assigned to the gigantic complex initials, and the very style of the illuminations that illustrate the texts clearly reveal the portals of that northern taste, which at the same time was widely diffused in the territories of Germany.
Meanwhile, once the controversies connected with the iconoclastic struggle were overcome, in the East between the 10th and 12th centuries, the art of illumination flourished anew, and magnificent codices were composed with loving and intelligent care in imperial libraries or transferred, as objects of high value, to the West.
The intense activity that characterizes the Romanesque age everywhere also reflected itself in the production of codices; their output multiplied in the scriptoria of the monasteries, where, to meet the ever-increasing demand, lay calligraphers and illuminators were also employed. Moreover, beyond sacred texts, secular works such as chivalric romances, legal or medical studies, treatises on every subject, even on the art of hunting, such as the *De arte venandi cum avibus* composed for Frederick II, of which a copy survives executed for King Manfred (1258–66) in the Vatican Library (cod. Pal. lat. 1271), were transcribed into codices.
Furthermore, as in every other field of art, the Romanesque age is also characterized in that of the codices by the accentuation and advancement of the characteristics proper to the preceding age, by their progressive and constant enrichment of expressive possibilities that, in our case, result in an ever greater unity and concreteness in the composition of the page. Here, large initials still echo elements of Carolingian and pre-Carolingian culture (Bible of the Communal Library of Perugia, cod. 439), or superimposed scenes in airy spaces recall ancient decorative themes perpetuated in the use of exultets (Life of St. Benedict, cod. Vat. lat. 1202), or complex figurations show direct relationships with Anglo-Saxon illumination (Chronicon Volturnense, Vatican Library, cod. Barb. lat. 2754).
Thus the advent of the Gothic period is prepared, whose spirit, to understand it properly, gave its first distant manifestations in the field of art precisely in the composition of certain illuminated pages of Irish codices, where the necessity and taste for enclosing and limiting the flights of vivid fantasy within the tight and unpredictable logic of a tangle of lines are already resolved in artistic forms. Within the large initials, which occupy half or three-quarters of the page, they divide the spaces into a thousand meanders. However, Gothic taste created its masterpieces in the field of codices precisely in the organic distribution of the material, whether writing or illumination, on the page.
This already renders admirable so many works still to be assigned to the Romanesque age (e.g., British Museum Library, Add. Ms. 18.720) and thus results in works of absolute beauty in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, especially in centers where Gothic culture and taste flourished most intensely and genuinely, such as in Italy at Siena, Bologna, and Lombardy, and beyond the Alps in France, where codices such as *Les très riches heures du duc de Berry* (Chantilly, Musée Condé) find no comparison for the harmony of their composition and the balance of the relationships between the space assigned to writing and that assigned to decoration.
The Renaissance brought to Italy a sense of the new architecture of classical taste even in the distribution of parts on the pages of codices, so that sometimes the pages rich in illuminations of works such as the Bible of Borso d’Este (Modena) and that of the Duke of Urbino (Vatican) might be said to have been studied in the distribution of balanced spaces between bases, pillars, cornices, and architraves by an architect rather than by a calligrapher or an illuminator.
When these forms spread to other regions of Europe, the art of printing had already rendered the labor of calligraphers vain, while the art of illumination had become a refined and practiced craft. From the earliest times, the leaves of codices were held together by bindings (q.v.). These were executed in parchment, leather, painted wood, or covered with fabric, parchment, or paper, but also in embossed metal plates adorned with stones and enamels, often rising to the dignity of true works of art.
— See Plates CXXIII–CXXIV.
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