Illuminierte Handschriften aus Österreich und Deutschland 1350-1410

Through their illustrations, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages hand down to us a vast amount of pictures, and thus considerably broaden our knowledge of Romanesque and Gothic painting. Unlike glass-, wall- and panel-paintings, so often impaired by natural decay or incompetent restoration, miniature paintings in books are usually well preserved. Mostly kept in monastic libraries, they were protected from the harmful effects of light and climate, and only exceptionally suffered from vandalism. On the other hand, their storage in relative seclusion accounted for their persistent neglect by art historians, whose attention was much sooner drawn to those murals, windows and altar-pieces that were easily accessible in churches or museums. In Austria, scholars began to fill this gap in our konwledge already around 1900, when they published the first series of catalogues of illuminated manuscripts owned by public and monastic libraries. Cataloguing the large holdings of the Austrian National Library was begun in the early 1920s, and by 1990 all Romanesque, Byzantine and Oriental manuscripts as well as all Gothic manuscripts from Western Europe and Italy had been described in some twenty volumes. Only the Gothic manuscripts from Central Europe - understandably the largest portion of the library`s collection - were temporarily omitted. From 1989, the FWF is supporting the cataloguing of these very manuscripts; the first volume (Central European Schools I, 1250-1350) was published in 1997. Within the scope of the present research project the subsequent volume was completed and delivered to the publisher. "Central European Schools II, 1350-1410" describes 212 manuscripts from the German-speaking countries, among them the chief works of the illuminators active for the ducal court in Vienna around 1400. Also included are, inter alia, four profusely illustrated "World Chronicles" and the oldest surviving copy of the "Alsatian" Romance of Tropy. On the basis of stylistic criteria, several other manuscripts could be assigned to various regions of Germany. A considerable number of the items described do not contain pictures at all. They are, however, adorned with those elaborate pen flourishes that are a peculiar feature of Gothic illumination. Among them we could single out the extensive production of two hitherto unknown Viennese workshops. Evidently, it is Art History that profits most from this project. However, the results of our research are equally beneficial to other desciplines as, e.g., General and Ecclesiastical History or German Philology. Besides, romances and chronicles offer authentic illustrative material for studying medieval realities such as fashion in clothes, household appliances or technical implements.