Include Initial Letters in Your Next Publishing Project

One of many lovely initials from the Middle Ages,
restored for contemporary use.

OW consider illustrating a bulletin or newsletter with Medieval, initial letters. There are many resources for initial letters on the internet. I will include a couple of free samples from my new collection below for visitors to use in their hard copy publications and a listing of additional collections on the web at the end of this post.

      The classical tradition, according to Wikipedia, was late to use capital letters for initials at all; in surviving Roman texts it often is difficult even to separate the words as spacing was not used either. In the Late Antique period both came into common use in Italy, the initials usually were set in the left margin (as in the third example below), as though to cut them off from the rest of the text, and about twice as tall as the other letters. The radical innovation of insular manuscripts was to make initials much larger, not indented, and for the letters immediately following the initial also to be larger, but diminishing in size (called the "diminuendo" effect, after the musical notation). Subsequently they became larger still, coloured, and penetrated farther and farther into the rest of the text, until the whole page might be taken over. The decoration of insular initials, especially large ones, was generally abstract and geometrical, or featured animals in patterns. Historiated initials were an Insular invention, but did not come into their own until the later developments of Ottonian art, Anglo-Saxon art, and the Romanesque style in particular. After this period, in Gothic art large paintings of scenes tended to go in rectangular framed spaces, and the initial, although often still historiated, tended to become smaller again.

      In the very early history of printing the typesetters would leave blank the necessary space, so that the initials could be added later by a scribe or miniature painter. Later initials were printed using separate blocks in woodcut or metalcut techniques.

   "For a century after the invention of printing, (Johannes Gutenberg, 1439) the art of illuminating made steady progress; but from that time it began gradually to decline, anrated in chd although it still existed so late as the seventeenth century, it was rarely practiced, and almost wholly confined to religious and heraldic  books. The discovery of engraving on wood having quickly followed that of printing, the drawings of the time were copied and multiplied by this cheaper process. The progress, also, of the reformation, and other religious and political causes, having at the same time combined to withdraw from Art the patronage it had received in most of the countries of Europe for so many ages, the fashion of illustrating books dwindled in frequency, degenearacter, and ultimately ceased altogether." Henry Shaw

Here you can see three examples of initial letters used to decorate a page from an illuminated manuscript, a book describing the history and practice of using initial letters and also a page from an illuminated hymnal.

Initial Letter "A" from my new collections.
This letter was drawn by Albert Durer in 1499

Initial Letter "F" from my new collections

Description of Illustration: initial letters "F", "A" and "N" in color

Watch this professional calligrapher craft an initial letter,"F."

• Find even more medieval initial letters at http://art-imagery.com/
• Typolis (in German), DE.
• "Initials and Ornaments", Book Historian (photos) (in Dutch), Yahoo Flickr.
• "Alphabet & Letter", Reusable art (images).
• One Thousand and One Initial Letters by Owen Jones
• Lessons in the Art of Illuminating by Loftie

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.