site stats

Monday, March 23, 2009

Art : Limbourg Brothers III - Illuminated Letter

Our latest Picture Study was Psalms XXVI of the Les Tres Riches Heures.

Upon the death of the Limbourg brothers, Jean Colombe was commissioned to complete their works. He intentionally retain the style of the Limbourg brothers. In this manuscript page, Colombe illuminated the verse and beautifully illustrated it. We followed this Picture Study up with delving into illuminated letters.

We flipped through a book about illuminations called the Illuminated Alphabet by Patricia Seligman and Timothy Noad. I bought this book at a book sale many years ago. (I am now thankful I did!) I was attracted to illuminated manuscripts in general after visiting the British Museum where I was spell-bound by all the richly illustrated and decorated manuscripts. The pictures and words just seem to jump up at you!

This book takes you through the history of the illuminated alphabet and has projects that exemplify various styles of illumination. We browsed through to get ideas for our own letter designs.

Since we were preparing for the boys' medieval birthday party, I decided we would make illuminated letters as decorations for the instructions to our Dragon Hunt (a game we were planning to have in the party). These are the letters we decorated.


Credits :
"D" and "S" by D
"I" and "H" by B
"T" by me :-)

We tried to design the letters with the text in mind. I will be posting pictures of how these were used in a later post.


Visit Rumphius Webpage Art to find out about how we approach Art in our homeschool.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...