One monk might serve as a draughtsman, laying out the text on the pages and indicating spaces for illustrations and other decorations. They would then be stretched on wide boards, scraped to the appropriate thinness, and cleaned. First, animal hides would have to be sourced to make parchment. Let’s assume that our manuscript was a book of prayer created by monks in a monastery, to be used as they went about their scheduled Liturgy of the Hours day by day. But to create an illuminated manuscript is a different kind of task altogether.Įvery element of an illuminated manuscript would have to be made by hand – the word “manuscript” literally means handwritten. There is no such thing as a party of one, no reason to transmit meaning if no one is on the receiving end. To our ears, this may sound like a futile sort of existence for an artist, utterly devoid of the raison d’être we have come to expect from the arts: fame, legacy, stature, permanence. A single book, which would more than likely spend the duration of its existence shut up in the walls of a monastery or a palace, only to be seen by a privileged few.Ĭhrist Enthroned, from the Book of Kells, 9th c. A single book, liable to fire, flood, dust, and decay. It is another thing entirely to recall that, after those years were over, the final product would be just one Bible. It ’s one thing to say that a Bible took years to make. Crouched all day over a single illustration, wrist hovering just over the little pools of fresh ink, attempting with the slightest flick of the wrist to capture the curve of a bird’s feather or the glint in a saint’s eye. Over the last century, and especially with the rise of social media in the last two decades, it has become almost impossible to envision a form of art that is not spoken about.Ĭompare all this with the life of a medieval illuminator. At times, as with the bottle rack, artistic work has drifted so far as to become more meaning than form. Cummings’s anyone lived in a pretty how town are so linguistically fragmented as to become a mosaic of sound, a pointillistic array of images and ideas expressed less with logic and meaning than with mood and impression.ġ954 Replica of Bottle Rack by Marcel Duchamp, 1914 (photo by Toohool, CC BY-SA 4.0)įine art, for all its own fragmentation, has instead become more conversational modernist pieces like Marcel Duchamp’s mass-produced bottle rack reflect an increasing motivation among artists not simply to mirror the messages of their patrons but to shape the conversation in their own right. Since the Victorian era and especially during the Modernist movement, artists, authors, and poets had started to experiment with the bounds of their respective crafts. But when I couldn’t get it right, there was always another video or article or diagram to guide me on my way.īut the sheer volume of artistic content available today has begun to blur the lines between syntax and symbolism. If I were to trace back my own interest in art as a discipline, it would have to have begun with the countless drawing videos I consumed as a child – often played in the background while I sat with my pencil or a mouse, awkwardly attempting to figure out where the eyes and ears really should go on the face. The near-universal availability of free or low-cost photography, editing software, painting programs, and other digital creative outlets have made it possible for millions to learn, master, and publish visual art on an unimaginable scale. Computers and phones have allowed virtually anyone to become an artist.
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