Historiated Initials in Calligraphy

Video Transcript

"So I have so many books on illuminated manuscripts that I want to share with you. I'm just going to show you the front. The History of Illuminated Manuscripts; this is a perfect example of a border of an illuminated manuscript. And I can almost not even begin to explain to you how something like this is done because it is so rich and so elaborate. It's rich in color, it's enormously rich in design. It's even amazing because it's actually quite small. I think that the original of this is probably not much larger than what you're seeing here. And there's lettering here and I believe that there is gold on this thing. And this is just one page. This is just one page, and of course, we've got the title of the book here, but in the original manuscript, there was a whole text that was here. It's probably Biblical. And here's another, sorry it's a little ripped, but here's another example. This is just the letter C. And what you see here inside this letter is what's called, it's called an historiated initial. It could also be called a versal, but it's an historiated initial, because it's like there's a story inside, so that's kind of where you get that term from. But look at this, it's got background so it has perspective. You have the foreground here and then you have a window and then you have somebody looking out, or rather, we can look out into the background."