What beauty have we lost in mass-producing books?
The, so to speak, “laborious process” accompanying the illuminated manuscripts reinforced their ‘primary’ identity as ‘a work of visual art with complementary ‘ekphrasis’’ as opposed to ‘a book with images’. And, I find, that in the modern era, we have forgotten the book is a piece of visual art, that the text itself is calligraphy, the page a canvas! Today we read, and do not see.
Consequently, the expertise and virtuosity present in the artwork of the illuminated manuscripts, qualities associated with the aesthetic, were lost at the birth of the printing press. We have thus misplaced, as an audience, our ability to appreciate virtuosity when the line between image and text is obscured.
The presence of an ‘anthropomorphic initial’ amidst a text today is perceived almost as tacky. Typewriter art, altered book art, and, indeed, Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes – forms of literature which unsuspectingly attempt to reconcile current, perhaps flawed, aesthetic values with the notion of ‘book as image’ – are relegated to embody only ‘experimental’, literary practices; an almost demeaning term.
And so, I ask why can’t a text be visual art, be illuminated, or “filled with light”, once more? Why not embolden words with vast technicolor? Why not see the letter ‘m’ as both from the alphabet and also as an impression of a bird at the back of a painting flying away too soon.
Jack,
You pose an extremely interesting question and debate over the value and/or nature of literature/text as an art form. I like how you commented on the implications of defining the illuminated manuscript as “a work of visual art with complementary ekphrasis,” as opposed to “a book with images” because the ambiguity of referring to images “with” versus “within” books proves to be an important subject of exploration in this course.
Your assertion that the book is, in fact, a piece of visual art which should be subject to a complex, aesthetic process is reflected by the drama portrayed in The Secret of Kells. The film illustrates the complex and laborious process of creating an illuminated manuscript and renders a sense of great admiration for the process as an important art form.
It’s really interesting to think about the trade-off that came with the invention of the printing press. While we may have lost the art of illuminated manuscripts with the advent of print, we gained something really important: the ability to disseminate important knowledge to people of all classes and backgrounds. The invention of the Internet and e-readers advanced that ability even further. However, I agree that as a society we have definitely lost respect for and acknowledgement of visual texts. Perhaps there is a way to re-introduce the concept that a book can be a visual work of art without losing the open exchange of information across the world? I hope so!
I think that the spirit of illumination still exists in modern literature, if on a smaller scale. An illustrator isn’t thinking about the print run–he or she is thinking about the process, the style, the translation from language to art, and so on. The process might be less laborious, but only because the artist now has a greater array of tools and resources, and it feels unfair to discount modern processes as somehow less than the antiquated ones.
I think you are forgetting an entire sector of the book industry in your post; the children’s book sector. Although the text may not be hand painted nor stylized according to linguistic regions, illustrators of children’s books (or rather any illustration found in novels, comics, or animation) still develop their own style and laboriously craft images to fit with text. Yes, of course. we need to keep in mind that style is affected by cost as well as by popular taste. If people are to buy books in the contemporary market, the work must be catered to consumption (since individual patrons are rare). However, these limitations do not mean that the work behind the final printed product is any less artistic that than the hand-made illuminations we have recently been exposed to.
Going off of what Xenia said before me, I find it interesting that the concept of having images within books has been deemed inferior to the written word and relegated to the land of lesser intelligence.
What I mean by this is that, during their time, illustrated manuscripts were almost exclusive to the wealthy, magical because they allowed the illiterate to follow a story and exalted in their general beauty; however, in the modern day books containing extensive amounts of images are almost entirely for children, who are often seen as intellectually inferior to adults. In addition, children’s books are mere stepping stones, usually meant to improve a child’s reading so that they can progress to a more complex book without images.
My guess is that images are seen as an imprecise and inferior form of communication in comparison to the written word, which is why modern texts have phased them out.
To Xenia and Carolin,
I agree that I perhaps did not fully consider the implication of comic books or children’s stories in the modern era. However, I would side with Carolin’s comments regarding the contemporary association between ‘images within books’ and those of perceived inferior intelligence. The ‘image’ has been relegated to the children’s book, to the comic books children hide between the pages of image-less, ‘literary masterpieces’. Society no longer values the image when associated with text.
And this shift, from the reverence of the image centuries ago to the inferiority of it today, may be caused, I feel, by the printing press and the subsequent deconstruction of the ‘artistic process’ inherent in producing illuminated manuscripts.