From: "Christopher Crockett" <[log in to unmask]:
>i'm trying to find the other illuminations from the same mss which j
michael
>referred to, but without much sucess.
>an url would help.
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See if this works:
http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecoleweb/images.html
Scroll down to the listings gathered beneath the letter "M."
Click on "Mark."
The seventh listing is:
French Illumination (XIV Century): St. Mark writing --- BNF
Takes awhile, but brings up the image.
Again, you will note identical backgrounds, similarly noodle-y fingers, etc.
But Mark (with his desk and winged lion) is comfortably situated within his
initial, all cozily enclosed with gilding and a black border.
The "air" around the bottom of the initial is more substantial, more
"planned" than in the depiction of Benedict.
I think I detect a black line near bottom of Benedict's staff, at a place
which would have made a more natural closure to the initial: it is this
line, perhaps, that the illuminator crossed and could not resolve.
Similarly, the initial for Mark has a span of gold at top which stops at the
letter "g" and then resumes, lower, to its right.
I'm sure things like this must have happened often.
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From: "Christopher Crockett" <[log in to unmask]:
my guess is that, while there *may* be one or two which actually *are*
unfinished (not a particularly rare event in mss, though not at all a common
one, either), they will be unambiguously so; e.g., they will be incomplete
at,
say the filling in stage, while the composition will totally laid out in
pencil or inked in or partially painted. such is not the case here: the
whole
thing is finished in all its stages.
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Hmmm.
I'd rather not go and dig it up, but a book I have, "Medieval Illuminators
and Their Methods" has a number of examples of just what you're describing,
because they are so notable. My sense is that the artist's equivalent to
forgetting to dot an "i" or cross a "t" is pretty small potatoes and usually
only noticeable to the artist her/himself.
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From: "Christopher Crockett" <[log in to unmask]:
and, if the fellow had wished to realise a "complete" scene depicting st
benny
with both feet firmly set terra firma he could have simply made the whole
composition smaller to fit the space, for example.
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Assuming both he (a) was not copying an existing image that same size, and
(b) was not trying to make all the saints equal in size, because (c) the
intials are the same size.
jmichael
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