The Art of Initials - When Letters Become Images

Of course, initials are first and foremost decorative ornaments that, like miniatures or borders, underline the value of a text, but should also represent the status and wealth of the patron. In some cases, however, they also function as a pictorial addition to the text, as long as their composition is related to the content. Above all, however, initials serve to structure and hierarchize a text by marking sections and creating clarity. Particularly important sections or the beginning of a new book or chapter, for example, can be highlighted with very large and splendid initials. Subchapters or shorter sections tend to be marked by smaller or plainer initials known as subsidiary initials. Thus, the decorations of initials are often hierarchically graded, as demonstrated by the page from the Oxford Decameron.

In the case of insular interlace initials, however, the creative abundance is particularly remarkable, since we are still in the early days of the art of initials. Not too long before, initials were not even a common principle of layout and order in book art. It is therefore not surprising that Carolingian illuminators liked to adopt the insular models, as the Lorsch Gospels and the Bible of St. Paul Outside the Walls show so marvelously, and that interlace initials can still be found even in the Ottonian Sacramentary of Henry II.

The French term "fleuronnée" refers to an ornament of stylized vegetal and sometimes geometric forms that have been varied in many ways. Since it was mainly drawn with a quill, the correspondinglinear ornamentis also known as penflourish or penwork. As decoration for ornamental initials, it spread rapidly beyond regional and genre boundaries from the 12th century onwards and became one of the most popular and widespread ornaments for the design of subsidiary, but also large initials. Penflourish initials occur in virtually all book genres over the centuries and were typically executed in red and blue. In this context, red penwork usually occupies blue letters and vice versa. The Ambrosian Virgil of Francesco Petrarca, however, contains a fine example of how golden capitals were also sometimes decorated with fleuronnée.

A champie initial is a painted letter - small or large - in a box that serves as a background and frame. These beautiful initials were often decorated in gold, with either the letter or the box shining in gold. Champie initials of plainer forms were usually used as small but still splendid subsidiary initials, though works such as The Codex of Astronomy and Astrology of King Wenceslas prove that it did not have to stop there.

In many precious manuscripts, fleuronnée or champie initials were combined with a complicated variation of the ornamental initial: the initial with scroll ornament. This general term describes ornamental initials with a dominant vine decoration that either develops around the body of the letter or forms the letter itself. Medieval book illuminators produced the most diverse forms of these complex initials, whose intertwined tendrils sometimes assume labyrinthine proportions - for example, in the Brandenburg Evangeliary and the Antiphonary of St. Peter.

In 11th-century Italy, a special form of the initial with scroll ornament developed that became very popular, especially in regional Renaissance painting: the white vine initial. Here, the book artists only worked out the contours of the often filigree tendrils and left the filling in the parchment or paper tone, so that they stand out in contrast against the multicolored backgrounds, as Christianus Prolianus Astronomia demonstrates particularly beautifully. The letters as such and small details of the ornamentation were also often illuminated with shimmering gold.

The interplay of the body of the letter and intertwined vines is taken to the extreme by the sometimes very intricate initials with split stems. As the name already indicates, they are characterized by their split stem (vertical part of the letter), which usually features an ornamental or at least chromatic infilling. Often braces, resembling forged metalwork, hold the split parts in place or even tie them together with some single vines.

This principle can be seen particularly well in the simple 'U' initial in the Nibelungenlied und die Klage: the vertical parts of the letter are split. The infilled ornament consist of small dots against a red background, while four horizontal clasps hold the split body of the letter and the inner vine ornament together.

A particularly fascinating and often humoristic variation of the initial with scroll ornament are the so-called gymnastic initials. These likewise vine-adorned capital letters are inhabited by animal and/or human figures that are purely decorative, meaning they have no textual reference. As the name implies, these mostly climb around between the tendrils, which sometimes appears quite gymnastic. However, sometimes you have to look very carefully to find all the figures...

The earliest forms of this type of initial can already be found in the fish-bird-initials of the Merovingian illumination of the early Middle Ages. However, throughout the medieval period, artists did not lose interest in incorporating animal bodies into the composition of elaborate initials: from somewhat simpler variations in which an animal body forms a letter, such as in the Speyer Pericopes, to complicated compositions in which the individual animals have to be literally searched for. Particularly impressive examples can be found above all in magnificent liturgical manuscripts such as the Gospels of John of Opava, the Brandenburg Evangeliary, or the Gospels of Henry the Lion, for whose rich illumination there were hardly any limits.

In the typical case of a clearly recognizable letter body serving as a frame, the latter takes up the figurative representation in its inner compartment. These were often author portraits, but also depictions of saints, rulers and patrons, or even personifications.

However, such initials could also house entire sceneries with several figures in landscapes or interiors, as, for example, the Divina Commedia di San Bernardo admirably demonstrates.

In exceptionally valuable manuscripts, the interplay of image and letter was often taken so far that the initials are hardly recognizable as such and seem to dissolve into the image. In the case of the 'Q' initial in the Goslar Gospels, for example, one might at first think that one is looking at a large pictorial medallion, until realizing that the evangelist Luke is sitting in the inner field of a bright round body of a letter. The so-called tail, i.e. the extension that distinguishes a 'Q' from an 'O', is also only visible at second glance, as it is formed by a green dragon with red wings that is trying to devour a human figure. A support for the viewer are the capital letters on the right side, which only make sense with a 'Q' at the beginning: QUONIAM QUIDEM - the first words of the Gospel of Luke.

A special variation of the historiated initial are ornamentally and partly zoomorphically designed capital letters that are 'inhabited' by figures referring to the text. Two particularly creative and artistic examples of this can be found in the Bamberg Psalter and the Sacramentary of Metz. While the zoomorphic initial with scroll ornament 'Q' forms the base for Goliath, the initial 'T' even becomes part of the scene depicted and thus functions not only as the first letter of the Te Igitur prayer, but also as the cross of Christ. The latter becomes even clearer when the gaze wanders upwards: the depiction of the sun and moon, personified by Sol and Luna, to the left and right above the crossbar typically belongs to the iconography of Christ's crucifixion.

In some manuscripts, historiated initials even make up the majority of the illumination, which testifies how highly appreciated the art of initials was in the Middle Ages, but also still during the Renaissance. Remarkable examples of this are, among others, the Latin Moamin with its countless falconry scenes in gold-decorated infilled initials, but also the precious Bible of Pietro Cavallini as well as the magnificent Gradual of St. Katharinenthal. Particularly noteworthy is also the Gradual of Gisela von Kerssenbrock, whose pages are truly covered with historiated initials of all sizes, depicting scenes from the life of Christ and Mary.

A completely different form of initials developed in the late Middle Ages: cadels. The term refers to capital letters, usually initials, which were designed in a spacious calligraphic manner from parallel and partially intersecting shafts and arches. A special gem of this type of letter is the Dancing Book of Margaret of Austria. Here, beautiful cadels in bright gold and silver ink stand out against the purple parchment on almost every page. In the Model Book of Calligraphy and in the Tyrolean Fishing Book of Emperor Maximilian, the principle of artistically intersecting lines is excessively developed.

With the first printed books (incunabula), there also appeared woodcut and later copperplate initials, which usually resemble ornamental champie initials. However, in very valuable books, such as some surviving Gutenberg Bibles, spaces were left during printing that could later be filled in by hand with painted ornamental initials according to the taste and budget of the patron. This circumstance shows how much initials belonged to book texts at the end of the Middle Ages and could hardly be imagined without them - as a principle of order as well as of decoration.