![]() ![]() In the page shown below- the beginning of the gospel of St Mark, you will see there are different ways in which the scribe used capital letters. The manuscript is written in Latin Vulgate.Ĭalligraphy The calligraphy in the book of Durrow develops the techniques of using large initial capital letters and the “Diminuendo” which was began a century earlier in the Cathach manuscript. It is a gospel book containing the four Gospels ( Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) together with the Canon Tables and some prefatory pages. It is the oldest illustrated manuscript in Ireland. ![]() The Book of Durrow dates from the 7th Century AD. Image -courtesy of the Royal Irish Academy. The letters that come after it gradually decrease in size until the script returns to normal size. You can see the use of Diminuendo – the initial ” G” is very large. Image -courtesy if the Royal Irish Academy. This indicates that these early scribes had contact with lands as far away as Egypt. In this you can see the Initial letters shows a fish or dolphin bearing a cross, a motif familiar in Coptic Egypt. In this detail you can see the use of red ink in the script and to decorate the Initial Letter ” D”, ( Please click image to make larger) You can also see the use of diminuendo ( the letters gradually getting smaller) Courtesy of the Royal Irish Academy Initial letter ” g”. Detail of Script from the Cathach Courtesy of the Royal Irish Academy. The capital “I” is made into an elaborate scroll. The “d” is decorated with a fish-tail and a double spiral. Some of the script is written in red ink and red dots are used to decorate some of the Initial Letters. This technique of calligraphy is called ” Diminuendo”. The Initial letter is drawn or scripted a very large size and the letters that follow gradually become smaller until they reach normal size again. Decoration in the manuscript is limited to the Initial Letter at the start of each psalm. It is a Psalter or book of Psalms and is written by one scribe in the “Early Majascule” script. Columba himself but this is no longer believed to be so. It was traditionally attributed to the hand of St. The title Cathach comes from the word battle in the Irish language and legend has it that the book was carried into battle. It is a copy of the psalms in Latin Vulgate ( a type of Latin) and is the oldest Irish manuscript. The Cathach dates from the 6th century AD. ![]() In many cases these books were illustrated with images and patterns, these type of books are called Illuminated Manuscripts. The Irish monastries became famous for producing beautiful handwritten books called Manuscripts. New bibles needed to be produced for the new monasteries and churches that were springing up all over the island of Ireland. Christianity is a religion of the book and the Irish who became monks learned how to read and write. ![]() Notable are the ninth-century bejeweled Lindau Gospels, the tenth-century Beatus, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, and the celebrated Hours of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the best-known Italian Renaissance manuscript.The arrival of Christianity during the fifth century AD began a process of change in Ireland. The majority of these books are of a religious nature, but the collection also includes important classical works, scientific manuscripts dealing with astronomy and medicine, and practical works on agriculture, hunting, and warfare. More than fifty Coptic manuscripts from Hamouli, Egypt, nearly all of which were found in their original bindings, form the oldest and most important group of Sahidic manuscripts from a single provenance, the Monastery of St. There are also examples of Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Arabic, Persian, and Indian manuscripts. The Morgan's collection is made up primarily of Western manuscripts, with French being the largest single national group, followed by Italian, English, German, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish. Although the collection was formed to illustrate the history of manuscript illumination and includes significant masterpieces from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, there are also some important textual manuscripts. To this should be added the Glazier, Heineman, Bühler, Stillman, and Wightman manuscripts, which include more than two hundred more items. Spanning some ten centuries of Western illumination, it includes more than eleven hundred manuscripts as well as papyri. Since Morgan's death in 1913, the collection has more than doubled. When Pierpont Morgan acquired his first medieval manuscripts at the end of the nineteenth century, he laid the foundation for a collection whose quality would rank among the greatest in the world. ![]()
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