An illuminated manuscript is a formally prepared document where the text is decorated with flourishes such as borders and miniature illustrations. Often used in the Roman Catholic Church for prayers and liturgical books such as psalters and courtly literature, the practice continued into secular texts from the 13th century onward and typically include proclamations, enrolled bills, laws, charters, inventories, and deeds.
Paolo Caliari, known as Paolo Veronese, was an Italian Renaissance painter based in Venice, known for extremely large history paintings of religion and mythology, such as The Wedding at Cana (1563) and The Feast in the House of Levi (1573). Included with Titian, a generation older, and Tintoretto, a decade senior, Veronese is one of the "great trio that dominated Venetian painting of the cinquecento" and the Late Renaissance in the 16th century. Known as a supreme colorist, and after an early period with Mannerism, Paolo Veronese developed a naturalist style of painting, influenced by Titian.
Giorgio Giulio Clovio or Juraj Julije Klović was an illuminator, miniaturist, and painter born in the Kingdom of Croatia, who was mostly active in Renaissance Italy. He is considered the greatest illuminator of the Italian High Renaissance, and arguably the last very notable artist in the long tradition of the illuminated manuscript, before some modern revivals.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu was a Japanese furniture designer and painter of the Rinpa school.
Raoul Dufy was a French painter associated with the Fauvist movement. He gained recognition for his vibrant and decorative style, which became popular in various forms, such as textile designs, and public building decorations. Dufy is most remembered for his artwork depicting outdoor social gatherings. In addition to painting, he was skilled in various other fields, including drawing, printmaking, book illustration, scenic design, furniture design, and planning public spaces.
Howard Chandler Christy was an American artist and illustrator. Famous for the "Christy Girl" – a colorful and illustrious successor to the "Gibson Girl" – Christy is also widely known for his iconic WWI military recruitment and Liberty loan posters, along with his 1940 masterpiece titled, Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, which is installed along the east stairwell of the United States Capitol.
A miniature is a small illustration used to decorate an ancient or medieval illuminated manuscript; the simple illustrations of the early codices having been miniated or delineated with that pigment. The generally small scale of such medieval pictures has led to etymological confusion with minuteness and to its application to small paintings, especially portrait miniatures, which did however grow from the same tradition and at least initially used similar techniques.
Jack Levine was an American Social Realist painter and printmaker best known for his satires on modern life, political corruption, and biblical narratives. Levine is considered one of the key artists of the Boston Expressionist movement.
Luca Cambiaso was an Italian painter and draughtsman and the leading artist in Genoa in the 16th century. He is considered the founder of the Genoese school who established the local tradition of historical fresco painting through his many decorations of Genoese churches and palaces. He produced a number of poetic night scenes. He was a prolific draughtsman who sometimes reduced figures to geometric forms. He was familiarly known as Lucchetto da Genova.
Simon Bening was a Flemish miniaturist, generally regarded as the last major artist of the Netherlandish tradition.
Byōbu are Japanese folding screens made from several joined panels, bearing decorative painting and calligraphy, used to separate interiors and enclose private spaces, among other uses.
Jane Schenthal Frank was an American multidisciplinary artist, known as a painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, illustrator, and textile artist. Her landscape-like, mixed-media abstract paintings are included in public collections, including those of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She studied with artists, Hans Hofmann and Norman Carlberg.
Simon Marmion was a French and Burgundian Early Netherlandish painter of panels and illuminated manuscripts. Marmion lived and worked in what is now France but for most of his lifetime was part of the Duchy of Burgundy in the Southern Netherlands.
A Muraqqa is an album in book form containing Islamic miniature paintings and specimens of Islamic calligraphy, normally from several different sources, and perhaps other matter. The album was popular among collectors in the Islamic world, and by the later 16th century became the predominant format for miniature painting in the Persian Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman empires, greatly affecting the direction taken by the painting traditions of the Persian miniature, Ottoman miniature and Mughal miniature. The album largely replaced the full-scale illustrated manuscript of classics of Persian poetry, which had been the typical vehicle for the finest miniature painters up to that time. The great cost and delay of commissioning a top-quality example of such a work essentially restricted them to the ruler and a handful of other great figures, who usually had to maintain a whole workshop of calligraphers, artists and other craftsmen, with a librarian to manage the whole process.
Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. Firstly, one binds the sheets of papers along an edge with a thick needle and strong thread. One can also use loose-leaf rings, binding posts, twin-loop spine coils, plastic spiral coils, and plastic spine combs, but they last for a shorter time. Next, one encloses the bound stack of paper in a cover. Finally, one places an attractive cover onto the boards, and features the publisher's information and artistic decorations.
Adrian George Feint was an Australian artist. He worked in various media, and is noted for his bookplate designs.
Pastiglia, an Italian term meaning "pastework", is low relief decoration, normally modelled in gesso or white lead, applied to build up a surface that may then be gilded or painted, or left plain. The technique was used in a variety of ways in Italy during the Renaissance. The term is mostly found in English applied to gilded work on picture frames or small pieces of furniture such as wooden caskets and cassoni, and also on areas of panel paintings, but there is some divergence as to the meaning of the term between these specialisms.
Geoffrey Olsen was a Welsh artist from Merthyr Tydfil, who spent time living in the Cotswolds, Rome, Florence and Miami.
Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.
The Pseudo-Jacquemart was an anonymous master illuminator active in Paris and Bourges between 1380 and 1415. He owed his name to his close collaboration with painter Jacquemart de Hesdin.
