Major Tendencies in Central European Manuscript illumination: 13th to 15th centuries

How a work of art is anchored in time, place and society is a basic question, art historians are expected to answer. The search for methods to determine this, is older than the profession itself, and is still topical. For decorated medieval manuscripts art historical expertise has additional relevance, as books are not only part of the cultural heritage preserving works of art on their pages, they are also historical sources. Their placement is fundamental for any further research based on the pictures as well as on the texts. With the ongoing digitalization and online presentation of medieval manuscripts they become more accessible than ever before, for the scientific community and for the public at large. The mere number of these works is intimidating, and the need for a better understanding of the general lines in the development of their decoration - which can help to determine the context of origin for a good number of them - is apparent. The project sets out to open perspectives to facilitate the contextualization of Central European manuscripts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, on the basis of their decoration and illustration. Historical accounts that trace the artistic development over a prolonged period, generally start with major works and then move on to discuss precursors, particularities, and impacts. The problem with this method is that these works usually only come about as the result of specific conditions, and for the majority of the material that has come down to us one cannot simply assume that these conditions were the same. In the proposed research project, production contexts will therefore be investigated for more substantial groups of books. Guiding questions will be, how the making of decorated manuscripts was organised, who was the most important clientele supporting it, what kinds of texts were copied - and how this effected the layout of the books. Three factors that are crucial in the period under investigation will constitute the main sections of the study. The first section will deal with those extra-monastic (commercial) manuscript illuminators who began producing books in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The second section will cover the flourishing fourteenth-century urban book cultures of three cities with quite different conditions for manuscript illustration: Vienna (a university city and sometime Habsburg residence), Cologne (ecclesiastical and an economic metropolis), and Lübeck (leading Hanseatic city). The subject of the third section is the emergence of the printed book and the concomitant replacement of painted illumination by printed decoration. This section will show how the decades of coexistence of handwriting and printing affected the development of book design, what was lost in the transitional phase, and finally what distinguishes medieval manuscripts from modern books.

The project aimed to better understand the direction in which late medieval book illumination developed. It focused on certain factors that had a particularly strong impact on formal and textual aspects of book decoration. In the 13th century, for example, the transition from monastic to commercial book production outside religious institutions shaped the appearance of books. In France and Italy, ateliers established themselves in cities with universities, which were not founded in the German-speaking countries until the second half of the 14th century. The question therefore is, how works are to be anchored, which previous research has suggested being products of the first German commercial ateliers. A new approach has been adopted for the study: The starting point was not, as before, the opaque colour paintings, which manifest the stylistic groupings but otherwise offer hardly any clues. Rather, the very specific drawn ornaments (fleuronné) that appear together with them were examined. This type of ornament also occurs sporadically on charters which precisely define their environment of origin. For the two most extensive groups of works thought to have been created outside monasteries in the 13th century, decorated initials on charters originating from two convents of Dominican nuns were found to be consistent, and these convents were verifiably among the first owners of some of the manuscripts from the respective group with the characteristic decoration. This shows that in German-speaking Central Europe, the beginnings of commercial book decoration in the 13th century are connected with the new branches of the mendicant orders, namely with the women's convents. Their interests and abilities decisively shaped the appearance of book illumination in the period. From the end of the 13th century, their illuminations increasingly appear alongside stylistically divergent miniatures and initials, some of which could be associated with other manuscript decorations. This provided information about further forms of commercial book illumination in this period: on one hand specialists who worked at changing locations can be observed, on the other hand local ateliers now emerged, that cannot be assigned to specific ecclesiastical institutions. Another new pillar of book illumination remains to be mentioned. In the 13th century, the book genre most frequently decorated with elaborate ornamentation was the psalter for private use. These manuscripts have also been attributed to urban ateliers, but the profile of the groups of works differs from the large-scale productions of the Dominican nuns as well as from the smaller groups of works of skilled illuminators, among other things because of the restriction to one genre of text and the sometimes considerable qualitative and stylistic differences: at least in some of the psalters, we encounter book illumination carried out by the owners themselves.