/r/illuminatedmanuscript

Photograph via snooOG

Share historical manuscripts, reproductions, and any resources related to the art and appreciation of illuminated manuscripts.

Illuminated Manuscripts is a community which seeks to share the historical art form of illumination. Texts from as early as the 5th century were embellished with beautiful, hand painted artwork that were used to chronicle history, serve as a focus for religious veneration, and generally make the pages more interesting to look at. True illumination requires the use of gold or silver leafing which catches the light and appears to have a light emanating from within the artwork (hence the name).

Share historical manuscripts, reproductions, and any resources related to the art and appreciation of illuminated manuscripts.

Related Subreddits

/r/SCA
/r/Calligraphy
/r/HistoricalCostuming
/r/MedievalHistory
/r/RenFaire
/r/ArmsAndArmor
/r/Woodblock
/r/FashionHistory
/r/History

/r/illuminatedmanuscript

4,225 Subscribers

46

Good Day @ HPB!

2 Comments
2024/11/06
00:30 UTC

97

Medieval Veterinarian and His Patient

Tried to recreate this medieval veterinarian and his patient from a 15th-century French manuscript spread titled “Illnesses of Dogs and Their Cures.” The manuscript, “Book of the Hunt” by Gaston Phébus, is at the Condé museum. I have a lovely reproduction of this spread in one of my favorite art books, “Cani nell’ Arte” (“Dogs in Art”) by Stefano Zuffi.

I took liberty with the color of the jacket, so that overall image works better as a handmade postcard.

7 Comments
2024/11/01
14:11 UTC

56

Not illuminated, but my latest decorated page in an ongoing project.

11 Comments
2024/10/29
19:09 UTC

12

We’ve revamped all the cards in our King Arthur RPG and are adding Illuminated Manuscripts. Our artist is trying out digital gold leaf to capture the classic look.. would love to hear your thoughts

1 Comment
2024/10/22
17:08 UTC

26

One of my first attempts at an illuminated letter. Doing full page-sized art of individual letters woth my students, hope to get good at smaller versals on my spare time!

1 Comment
2024/10/16
13:50 UTC

1

Recreating illumination art style digitally

This sounds blasphemous but I am hoping to recreate illuminated style art digitally using paint brush style tools in procreate, as I have a concept design I’m hoping to create for a poster.

Has anyone attempted this successfully, or would it be better practice to paint on paper/real life and digitise the design? I have a vision in my head that I’m really hoping to execute but unsure the practicality.

0 Comments
2024/10/14
06:36 UTC

9

This is a long shot, but does anyone have a digital copy of the Oscott Psalter (c. 1265-70)?

My wife and I are working on a personal research project, and we've found an image of a marginalia rodent that is attributed to the Oscott Psalter, but it's a very close-cropped image, and we were hoping to see the text surrounding it to get some context.

Unfortunately, due to last year's cyberattack on the British Library, the current home of the manuscript, only a few pages of it are available on their website, and who knows when that will get fixed.

So I was hoping reddit could do some reddit magic and direct me to someone or somewhere that might have a digitized copy of the text in a personal collection.

But, as many of the top posts in this subreddit indicate, It's not looking likely.

10 Comments
2024/10/09
20:54 UTC

55

I'm getting better on it!

2 Comments
2024/10/03
15:36 UTC

3

Textura Quadrata

Does anyone know what manuscripts, especially with illumination, has the best examples of Gothic textura quadrata. I am working on a project and want to know what would be the most stylistically appropriate.

3 Comments
2024/09/23
20:58 UTC

77

Where can I view the complete Lindisfarne Gospels? Is there some pdf or something?

11 Comments
2024/09/05
09:50 UTC

2

Looking for facsimile of Taymouth hours

I’m looking to recreate a medieval Book of Hours on a book I’ve recently made. Ideally I would have first illustrated the pages then bound them but that was unfortunately not an option. I needed to find a manuscript that would roughly fit into 80 pages and the Taymouth hours seemed like it might work.

My only issue is that the only digitally facsimile I could find of the Taymouth hours is on the British Library’s website, which is currently dysfunctional due to a cyber attack several months ago. Does anyone know somewhere else where I can find a digital facsimile of the text? Alternatively, would anyone else happen to know of another book of hours that could roughly fit in about 80 pages?

If you can manage to help me find it, I’ll include a reference to your username in the miniatures somewhere (if possible).

2 Comments
2024/09/01
10:42 UTC

9

Looking to purchase printed copies of manuscripts

I was falling into a Wikipedia rabbithole on illuminated manuscripts and found some with particularly beautiful and engaging art and text, and it led me to want to find bound reproductions of some of these works that are as faithful as possible to the original material. Particularly I was interested in finding one for the Froissart of Louis of Gruuthuse and also of The Book of Kells. However, when I looked online for a while, I was unable to really find anything that was like what I was looking for. I could find books of prints of the miniatures in a lot of the manuscripts, but I couldn't find full 1:1 replicas of the volumes themselves. Does anyone on here know of any place I could find something like that? (Ideally as faithful as possible, I'm thinking the same aspect ratios and form factors, low grain on prints, as close as it gets to a page for page replica)

Thanks in advance to anyone who may have any info, this seems like a really cool community and I have a lot of admiration for your creations :)

8 Comments
2024/08/13
14:54 UTC

72

Not done yet but I think this is going *okay* so far

Igno

13 Comments
2024/08/12
11:36 UTC

50

Practice piece - Never painted before....am i on the right track?

11 Comments
2024/08/11
12:19 UTC

5

Sanctus Gulianos of the molten hair

1 Comment
2024/08/03
06:17 UTC

35

John receiving the vision

4 Comments
2024/08/02
13:22 UTC

23

Caught Practicing: The REAL REASON Snails Appear in Manuscripts

0 Comments
2024/08/01
18:03 UTC

27

Does this Judgey angel idea work okay? /is it kinda scary?

10 Comments
2024/07/31
14:30 UTC

12

Perhaps a dumb question, but historically were illuminations ever done on paper?

Hi everyone, as a relative newbie starting to get interested in illuminated manuscripts i was just wondering if original illuminations were ever done on paper or was vellum the only substrate for them?

Also, does anyone know if historical manuscripts ever used a combination of vellum and paper leaves in their construction, or was it always just one or the other?

6 Comments
2024/07/25
13:16 UTC

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