Remains of a Medieval Italian Antiphonal ILLUMINATIONS

The eighteen leaves each possess one large fully illuminated initial, making eighteen total: nine historiated, inhabited initials, and nine floral. The opposite side of each leaf has litterae notabiliores, smaller, decorated initials introducing incipits, whose height may graze the edge of the music staff but only cover one line of text. They are either colored in red and elaborated on in blue, or vice versa; they also occur on the side with the illumination. The size of the illuminations varies from two music staves/text lines tall to almost the full page, with five covered on the first folio. They extend into the margins without reserve, often being cut off as a result of trimming. The bright colors have a wide range of hue, with skilled shading and chiaroscuro techniques employed. Gold leaf is used both in the initials themselves and for the small gold balls scattered throughout the tangential illuminations. The sophisticated yet simple, elaborate yet unadorned design of these illumnations echo the style of many other Northern Italian liturgical books. All using comparable littera gothica textualis scripts, and often with similar musical notation, particular extant antiphonals, graduals, and service missals created in the fourteenth century also use the same techniques of color and line for the illumination of these leaves. Comparison of specific illuminations will show that the correlation can be narrowed to the regions of Bologna, Parma, Perugia and surrounding centers of scribal culture.

[Further work is in progress on identifying the tradition to which these illuminations belong.]

Image Source: Illumination from folio 17^V.

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