29-06-2026, 01:35 PM
In the forthcoming book Colin and I are co-editing, I have written an entire chapter about art and artists in the manuscript. The argument is lengthy, so I won't reproduce it here (you'll have to wait for the book, forthcoming in late 2027 or early 2028, hopefully). The upshot is that I am arguing that - for the most part - the scribes illustrated the pages they wrote. This explains in part why the art is so amateurish - it was drawn by scribes, not artists. In consultation with several medieval art historians, I've analyzed several features of the drawings that help distinguish the artists - not just the A/B plant distinctions so aptly laid out by Coen and Cary, but faces, use of color (which I think is almost certainly original, although I do not have explanations for each of the surviving guide-letters beneath the pigment), and more. Each of the singulions, then, can be interpreted as the product of a single artisan who both wrote and decorated. There are exceptions - there are currently 50 complete bifolia in the manuscript, two leaves are missing their conjoints, and six other bifolia are missing, and of those fifty, most - but not all - can be attributed to a single scribe/artist.
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