Medieval Ornament. Illuminated Manuscripts (3). Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Plate 73 from the book: The grammar of ornament

Plate 73 of 112 from Owen Jones' The Grammar of Ornament (1868). The coloured illustration shows various decorative borders and ornamental letters used in Italian illuminated manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Jones explains in his text that this plate demonstrates the evolution of the craft, as these illustrations were produced by a painter, rather than a scribe, as was previously the case: "Up to this period the ornaments are still within the province of the scribe, and are all first outlined with a black line and then coloured, but on Plate LXXIII. we shall find that the painter began to usurp the office of the scribe."

He writes further: "Nos. 1, 2, are specimens of a peculiar style of Italian MSS., which was a revival in the fifteenth century of the system of ornament so prevalent  in the twelfth. It led to the style No. 3, where the interlaced pattern became highly coloured on the gold ground. This style also died out in the same way, the interlacings, from being purely geometrical forms, became imitations of natural branches, and, of course, when it  arrived thus far there could be no further progress."