ILLUMINATED PAGES. A MIDDLE AGES TRIP IN THE FIELD OF COLOR
ILLUMINATED PAGES. A MIDDLE AGES TRIP IN THE FIELD OF COLOR

Summary/Abstract: We are surrounded by color, light, images and to transpose these things we have today modern and sophisticated graphic designers, illustrators and painters. Going down the steps of history, however, we will find a possible starting point for graphic design, in what are called illuminated manuscripts. An illuminated (Catalogue of Illuminated manuscripts, online source) manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is completed with decorations such as initials, margins (marginalia) and miniature illustrations. In the strictest definition, the term refers only to manuscripts decorated with either gold or silver; but both in common usage and in modern teaching, the term refers to any manuscript decorated or illustrated in Western traditions. Comparable works from the Far East and Mesoamerican are described as painted. Islamic manuscripts can be called illuminated, illustrated or painted, using essentially the same techniques as Western works. The oldest illuminated manuscripts are considered to be from the period 400-600 A.D., produced in Western Europe, the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths but also in the Eastern Roman Empire. Their importance lies not only in their inherent artistic and historical value, but also in maintaining a literacy link provided by unenlightened texts. Were it not for the monastic scholars of late antiquity, most of the literature in Greece and Rome would have perished. Indeed, models of textual survival have been shaped by their usefulness to the group of severely literate Christians. The illumination of manuscripts, as a way of enlarging ancient documents, helped to preserve and inform their value in an era when the new ruling classes were no longer literate, at least in the language used in manuscripts.

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