[MR] Art Review: Paul Richard: Manuscripts Shine at National Gallery, Where Everything Is Illuminated -- 'Heaven on Earth' at the National Gallery of Art --- washingtonpost.com

[David Chessler]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040303762.html?hpid=sec-artsliving

<<snip>>

But the 52 pages from old vandalized books in "Heaven on Earth: 
Manuscript Illuminations From the National Gallery of Art" are the 
opposite of trash. They declare their preciousness as soon as one 
lays eyes on them. They gleam of polished gold. Their layout and 
their letters and their focused little pictures show excellent 
control of the shiny and the tiny. Their calculated parts have been 
fit together finely by specialists in many skills. It's like looking 
at the innards of a bejeweled watch.

We drown in paper, but these pages are vellum -- lambskin, kidskin or 
calfskin -- and vellum was never cheap. There was the training of the 
dog and the tending of the flock and the tanning and the flattening, 
the scraping and the bleaching, and you'd only gotten started. 
Painters, gilders, binders, scribes, all of these came later. The 
psalters, missals, Bibles, chronicles and choir books of the 12th to 
16th centuries from which these leaves were cut cost, and just for 
starters, one animal per page.

<<snip>>

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YIS

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