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Updated: May 17, 2025
Plautus paints his characters with broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles the psychological development with a careful and often excellent miniature-painting, as in the -Adelphi- for instance, where the two old men the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly harassed not at all refined country-landlord form a masterly contrast.
We have a bookless North, severed but by a frontier pillar from a golden and learned South. The arts, from architecture to miniature-painting, are in their highest perfection, while knights still tourney in armour, and the quarrel of two nations is decided as in the gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby de la Zouche.
Plautus paints his characters with broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles the psychological development with a careful and often excellent miniature-painting, as in the -Adelphi- for instance, where the two old men the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly harassed not at all refined country-landlord form a masterly contrast.
But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun; and French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the art of miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth.
Miniature-painting flourished under the rule of Charlemagne and his family, and reached a point of great magnificence in effect, though it was never as artistic as the work of the Italian miniators; and, indeed, gradually everything connected with art was declining in all parts of the world; and as we study its history, we can understand why the terms Dark Ages and Middle Ages are used to denote the same epoch, remarkable as it is for the decay and extinction of so many beautiful things.
The monks were largely occupied in miniature-painting; artists frequented the monasteries, and, indeed, when they were engaged upon religious subjects, they were frequently under the same discipline as that of the monks themselves.
But of this interesting peculiarity of Russian intellectual life, in the years 1840 to 1860, I will speak more fully when analysing another of Turgenev's novels in which this contrast is most conspicuous. I will say nothing of the minor characters of the story before us: Lezhnyov, Pigasov, Madame Lasunsky, Pandalevsky, who are all excellent examples of what may be called miniature-painting.
This was the origin of illumination or miniature-painting, which went on from one step to another until, at its highest state, most beautiful pictures were painted in manuscripts in which rich colors were used on gold or silver backgrounds, and the effect of the whole was as rich and ornamental as it is possible to imagine.
No wall-paintings or mosaics remain from the early German or Celtic peoples; but their illuminated manuscripts are very numerous: miniature-painting was extensively done in Ireland, and many Irish manuscripts remain in the collections of Great Britain.
He saw that I could not be allowed to spend my whole time in a little stuffy room making solemn and ridiculous imitations of Papers read before the Linnaean Society. He was grieved, moreover, at the badness of my pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history.
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