Illuminator
An illuminator is an artist who illustrates manuscripts and books with pictures, ornaments and initials . Together with gilders and other people who are involved in decorating a book, they are also known as illuminators . The task of the rubricators , however, was to provide the texts with colored structuring and order as well as simple decorative elements, for example with initial letters and paragraph markings .
From late antiquity to the Renaissance , book illumination was one of the most important art genres, but with the spread of letterpress and printmaking in the 15th century it lost its importance.
As illumination or illumination of the whole of the decorative elements used in the book painting is called, which thus includes all the awards of the text and the design of the side edges in addition to the text-related illustrations. Although the term painting is common for medieval book illustrations , these are usually colored drawings that were created by the draftsman (Adumbrator) and the painter one after the other. The various work steps were either in the hands of an artist or were organized in a workshop based on division of labor. To ensure a uniform appearance of recurring illuminations z. B. to ensure within an edition of books, one often used a sample book .
The first illuminators of the early Middle Ages were in monasteries, where monks worked as scribes, painters and bookbinders, among other things. The illuminators of the Ottonian period around 1000 are considered to be artistically outstanding. Most illuminators remained anonymous until the 13th century, but the names of some of these early artists have been passed down. In particular, such artists have only been known in large numbers since the 13th century. In the 15th century, famous artists ran large workshops.
Georg Hoefnagel is one of the well-known illuminators of the 16th century .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Horst Wolf: German book painting of the early Middle Ages. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-374-00843-7 , pp. 16-19 ( visions of Ottonian imagery ) and 47.
- ^ Dagmar Thoss: Georg Hoefnagel and his relationship to Gent-Bruges book painting. In: Yearbook of the Art History Collections in Vienna. Volume 82/83, 1986/87, pp. 199-211.