Patricia Lovett MBE

Calligraphy | Illumination | Design

Tag Archives: gesso

Gilding and painting a miniature of a female martyr

I had been asked to speak at the Houghton Library, and teach and give a demonstration at Harvard as part of the wonderful ‘Beyond Words’ exhibition there. Taking a lot of tools and materials on a plane is not sensible, and so I decided to almost finish a tiny miniature shown in the exhibition, which is a cutting from an Italian mid-fifteenth century Anitphonal (Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 983), and then add some more gold and paint more as a demonstration. The original female martyr, holding her martyr’s palm, had a bit of a double chin and a rather unfortunate expression, so I decided to do a bit of cosmetic surgery on her, and make a few adjustments (if only it was that easy in real life!).

I selected a piece of vellum which had hair follicle markings on it and traced down the outline in red (minium) which is traditional. I then laid gesso ready to receive the real gold leaf.

I planned from the start not to gild it all so that I could show how it was done when I went to Harvard.

Then it was on to painting the base colours. At this point, as always, any painting skills that you think you might have seem to go out the window (!).

However, once the shades and tones, fine lines and details are added, suddenly the whole thing seems to come to life. The face, hair, hands and delicate white tracery on the blue background are very finely painted indeed, the dress and left-hand side of the initial ‘D’ less so. It is quite possible that the ‘master’ did the former, and an apprentice did the slightly less-well executed ‘colouring in’. It was a very interesting exercise and I do hope that Harvard find it a useful addition to their teaching repertoire.

This entry was posted in Blog, Exhibitions, Interesting stuff, Manuscripts and tagged Beyond Words, gesso, gold, Harvard, Harvard University, Houghton Library, minium, MS Typ 983, painting a mediaeval miniature, painting a medieval minaiture, vellum on 16 October 2016 by Patricia.

Vellum ‘music’ book

I am always on the lookout for suitable quotations to write out, and, as I am keen on music, when I had a collection of phrases on the topic, I decided to do something with them.

It took quite a few years before I could get round to it, but I was eventually able to combine the music quotations with a spare piece of vellum I had and make a vellum book. To start with I experimented with nib size and writing style, and settled on the fallback of Italic. So I wrote out all the quotations to see how many lines each would take and what sort of shape they would be. I wrote out the authors’ names in tiny capitals as a contrast.

Then I cut up the different quotations and used magic tape to attach the authors’ names underneath in what I thought was the best position. I played around with blocks of text to try to get a balance in terms of layout, and placed these in various positions on a large piece of paper.

When I was happy with this, I marked all the positions and took measurements of exactly where each separate block of text, with the writers’ names, started and finished.

Then it was time to determine the exact page size. The top margin is usually smaller than the bottom, and the two outer and the inner margins about the same (the ratio for a classically laid out manuscript book is 2 units at the top, 4 units at the bottom, and 3 units at each outer edge and in the gutter [fold]).

I selected a reasonably robust piece of vellum so that it wouldn’t buckle and cockle too much, but note the distinct curve of the skin on the above right. This is the piece of vellum without being under weights, and not sewn into a book.The skin was prepared (see Illumination DVD) and the positions of the lines were marked by pin pricks using a set of compasses (see Calligraphy Clip, Measuring lines) then the lines were drawn with a 4H pencil.

To avoid the lettering looking too boring I wrote the text blocks alternately in Chinese liquid ink, and ultramarine Schmincke Calligraphy gouache. I also had the idea for a bit of levity by inserting a raised gesso musical note covered in pure gold leaf, (the same process as used for raised gold in mediæval illuminated manuscripts), between each of the text blocks.

I was fortunate in that my training many years ago also included bookbinding, which I enjoy very much, so making the vellum sheet into a book wasn’t too much of a challenge. Acid-free 230 gsm hp paper was used for the title page and colophon. I was given some lovely Indian hand-made paper marbled with gold swirls which seemed appropriate for the end papers, and also had some black and gold fabric with which I covered the boards for the book. So it was a case of folding, trimming, sewing and sticking and the book was done.