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Joseph Pennell
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The old illustrator in his work was simply nothing if not a moralist, though he himself may have been a most amusing person, while his treatment of even the most sacred subjects was frequently the broadest and most suggestive. Still, he was commissioned solely to "point a moral and adorn a tale." As for the court painters, their work was never seen by the people at all, any more than it is now, often luckily. But what were the portraits of Velasquez, the groups of Rembrandt, the feasts of Veronese, the processions of Carpaccio? The work of all court and portrait painters is but the recording, that is, the illustration, of human vanity; and the work of all subject painters is but the recording, that is, the illustration, of great and important events; while landscape painting, a modern invention, is only more or less glorified topography.
With the writing and illustrating of manuscripts, however, there had been developed a school of minor artists and craftsmen: illuminators and scribes who—mainly taking for their subjects either a portion of some painting by a master, but usually the mere mechanical part of the early painters' backgrounds, the mechanical gold punch design of the primitives, the elaborate, but mannered and conventional, foregrounds of Botticelli, and the entire compositions, more or less altered, of Fra Angelico and Pinturicchio—by "lifting" these things judiciously, evolved the art of illumination. It must be borne in mind that this illumination, in its detail and accessories often very beautiful and conventionally decorative, in its main subject almost always as realistic as possible, was the work, with two or three most notable exceptions, of second- and third-rate clever technicians, but in no sense great creative artists at all. Only a few well-known painters were ever employed to illuminate important manuscripts.
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