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Ever since I heard about the Duke of Berry and his books of hours, I’ve been more drawn to the Belles Heures du duc de Berry than the Très Riches Heures. I particularly love the ornamental decorations present on each page (rinceau borders). In other books of hours, these borders are more colorful, with less gold. And I really like that these ones are very gilded.
I decided to create an illuminated bi-folio based on the model of the Belles Heures. To do this, I took an unfinished page from the Belles Heures and vectorized the rinceaux (foliage borders) on my reMarkable tablet.
The most difficult part was choosing the dimensions. I hesitated a lot between the square root of 2 or the golden ratio. Finally, I opted for the golden ratio. And to determine the text space, I used basic page layout rules, with very wide margins for the rinceaux.
I spent a long time choosing the text. It needed to be fairly short, but interesting enough to merit an illumination. I finally settled on the “Emerald Tablet”.
Then, the second difficult task was the calligraphy. At first, I opted for Carolingian script, but since the width of these characters was too large, I didn’t have enough lines for my small text space. Gothic script better suits the spirit of the document, the characters are narrower, allowing me to fit more words per line.
In the Belles Heures, the script used is Gothic script called littera textualis. For my text, I chose textus quadratus because I have this font on my computer. To make the work easier, I did the text layout on the computer with the textus quadratus font. Then, I traced over it with my calligraphy pen. Unfortunately, my lack of experience shows because not only are the characters irregular but I also made mistakes (which I had to scrape off with a cutter), and the thin strokes aren’t as thin as they should be. I think I should have used a nib more suited to Gothic script.
Now for the gilding.
I left the leaves blank for the colors and fortunately so because I realize that with only gilded rinceaux, it looks a bit bland since there are no colored illustrations.
I added leaves in ultramarine blue and vermilion red and I think it looks much better.
Despite the calligraphy mistakes, the title not being quite straight and somewhat irregular lines, I’m still very happy with the result. This is my first step toward much more ambitious and larger projects.
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