Hand-painted books produced in the Low Countries during the late Middle
Ages are dazzingly inventive, widely admired both in their own time and
today. The makers of Flemish illuminated manuscripts experimented,
sometimes flamboyantly, with all aspects of their design, manipulating
elements of their format, layout, script, decoration and illustration in
radically new and challenging ways. In this book, James H. Marrow
discusses prominent features of many of the most exuberant illuminated
manuscripts created by leading Flemish illuminators of the 15th and the
16th centuries, considering both the playful ways in which the makers of
these books reconfigured their design and the ways they exploited these
innovations to define and convey the meaning of their contents more
effectively. Marrow considers how the designers of these manuscripts
broke down the barriers between the different components of the book;
how the shapes of some manuscripts became a kind of image; how script
sometimes became decoration or one of several illusionistically treated
elements or fields on the page; and how decoration and illustration were
intermixed in diverse, witty, and provocative fashions. In this final
stage in the evolution of the medieval book, leading Flemish
illuminators fundamentally changed the structural dynamics of the page,
enlarging its fields of visual and pictorial interest and exploiting
novel juxtapositions of subject matter and scale, of viewpoint and
different kinds of illusionism, to guide viewers beyond the
here-and-now, to evoke multiple and alternative levels of truth, and to
effect profound transformations of understanding. This is an incisive
study of the course of these developments in the Low Countries and of
some of the important ways in which they engaged issues central to the
function of the visual arts.
