Word: vellum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...climax of the show, however, is not gold but vellum. If one were to trace to its source the ancient Irish reverence for language-for the Word as the incarnation of truth, as the fundamental building block of culture and religion-it would surely lie in the great illuminated codices of the 6th to 8th centuries, made and preserved in such monastic communities as Burrow, Kells and Lindisfarne. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word...
...contrast between antiquity and modernity is less startling in the Drawing Lab, where works on the whole are made with much more recent material. Drawings on paper only began around the 14th century. Before that they were done on vellum, as in illuminated manuscripts. One of the chief problems posed by the care of modern drawings (since the 19th century) carries the ominous title of "communicable acid degeneration." Apparently, half-way through the 1800's, when people began cutting down trees instead of using old rags to make paper, the cardboard used to back drawings acquired a highly acid quality...
...part of it was a library of rather more than 300 manuscripts, many illuminated by artists whom the duke retained at court. Today, book illustration is considered a minor art. In medieval France, these tiny images stippled on vellum were considered the most important form of painting...
...leading artist in early 15th century Milan. Nearly all Michelino's work is lost, but most of what remains was recently bought by New York's Pierpont Morgan Library. It consists of a tiny (6¾ in. by 4¾ in.) prayerbook, containing 22 miniatures on vellum that Mi-chelino painted sometime around 1420. John Plummer, the Morgan's curator of medieval and renaissance manuscripts, compares his new treasure with such supreme achievements of manuscript painting as the Tres Riches Heures of the Due de Berry. Michelino's con-'emporaries in Milan could well have...
...monkish illuminator on the brain's vellum, a contemplative who shunned the world of action and became one of the very few 20th century painters who could work small without implying some degree of frustration. Paul Klee's natural space was a scrap of paper ten inches wide, and all its perspectives faced inward. "I have never," said his friend Jankel Adler, "seen a man who had such creative quiet. His face was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. I have often seen Klee's window from...