Самоковската художествена школа и украсата на ръкописната книга
The Samokov Painting School and the Illumination of the Manuscript

Summary/Abstract: In their repertory, the zographs belonging to the Samokov painting school included illuminated manuscripts, which in the major part have not been studied yet. Most of them were written for personal use connected with the zographs’ work (hermēneia) as well as for satisfying spiri- tual needs (prayer-books), for self-educating purposes (manuals) or for replenishing private libraries (Aesop’s fables). Their illumination has complicated relations not only with the hand-written tradition, but with the tradition of printed book as well. Samokov zographs were acquainted with the illumination rules of the manuscripts and generally followed them . They put headpieces at the beginning and tailpieces at the end of the texts, used cinnabar in the titles and made decorated initials and miniatures. However, with few exceptions, the painters did not employ the decorative repertory of the former centuries . In their manuscripts the geometric compositions, interlaced design and palmettes are completely missing . The compositions are inventive and do not repeat anything traditional even when teratological images have been utilized . Major part of the ornaments is inseparable from the decorative system elaborated by the zographs from Samokov and applied to the monumental painting: sprays, baskets of flowers, cartouches etc. The influence of printed book is most obvious in a hand-written miscellany by Nicola Obrazopisov. In other manuscripts it is displayed in accomplishing of the title pages, in using the pattern of the typographic semiuncial and even in applying of pagination, including the cases of artistically treated numbering of the pages. The manuscript illumination practiced by the Samokov zographs should not be defined as a belated or archaizing phenomenon, but, as a last stage of the development of the history of Bulgarian hand-written book .

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