Hemmling, Lucas von Leyden, and others; and Italian ones by Girolamo de' Libri and Giulio Clovio. The wonderful beauty and value of some of the specimens so enriched may be easily conceived. In Italy, in the early part of the fifteenth century, a very elegant style of white interlaced ornaments, on coloured grounds, prevailed, which is not found elsewhere (Plate XIVa. No. 2). And in the latter part of that epoch and the beginning of the sixteenth century, some of the gigantic letters of the great Italian choral books were truly magnificent, of which the specimen, Plate XXII., is a good, though somewhat coarse, example. But a small capital letter O in Plate XXIV. may serve to convey some idea of the intricacy and beauty with which works of this kind were occasionally elaborated in Italy. The beauty of Flemish illuminated letters of the same period may be estimated from one or two examples in the same plate; and, to cite one or two MSS. of the most usual styles of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I may mention the Prayer-Book of Henry VI. and the Chronicles of England written and illuminated for Edward IV., as examples of two styles of open-work, and the Romance of the Rose, and a Missal illuminated by Hemmling, as fine examples of borders formed of flowers and other ornaments, on gold, or richly-coloured grounds; all of which, and many other magnificent specimens, are in the British Museum. The finest example of Italian art of the end of the fifteenth century in England is probably the Missal illuminated for the Duchess of Urbino, preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which is scarcely surpassed by the Dante, illuminated by Giulio Clovio, in the library of the Vatican. Hundreds of other examples, in many variations of style, might be cited; but the art of illumination after it became separated from that of writing, does not strictly form part of the subject of this work. Yet, as before stated, the specimens chronologically arranged in Plates XXIII. and XXIV. exhibit a series of examples up to the period of its final decline; the last letter (0) of Plate XXIV being from a MSS. Missal, executed in France as late as the reign of Louis XIV. |