ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 479

passages which must have given a material direction to the art of illuminated writing, and especially in the effective introduction of colour.¹

6. This period-the middle of the thirteenth century-was marked also by the career of St. Louis, and the next example which he (the lecturer) had to produce was from a psalter² emblazoned by the fleur de lis and castle, which were on all works done for St. Louis, which was peculiar in having, in addition to the names of the saints, the names of the members of St. Louis’s family, with the dates of their deaths, but not that of St. Louis himself. First, there was the name of Count Robert of Artois, St. Louis’s brother, who lost his life while charging the Saracens at Mansourah-just as our light cavalry had charged the Russians at Balaklava. There was thus a note of his death which was put down as a sort of martyrdom. Then there were the names of King Philip II., then that of Louis VIII.,³ the father, and of Blanche of Castile, the mother of St. Louis, but not his own. Now, Queen Blanche died in 1252, and St. Louis himself in 1270, so that it was evident this psalter was written between those two periods, and the different portions of it at some distance of time from each other. The leaf exhibited was one of the common leaves taken from the beginning of the book. The flourish of the initial letter he had enlarged, in order to show more clearly what sort of a thing it was. The prevailing colours were blue, purple, and scarlet, with gold, and black and white were introduced in smaller quantities. Leaves were introduced, and the ornament, it would be perceived, was constantly changing in form and in the curve and life of the leaf. If there were no change there could be no life. A person could not live without change; not a tree or a leaf could live without growth. That might be taken as the great rule of all living art. He might, while upon this point, remark, that one of the great evils of the day was an intense love of symmetry. Nothing in nature was perfectly symmetrical. No two sides of any animal, tree, or other natural object, were exactly alike. Try to brush your hair exactly alike on both sides, and you will find it could not be done. A statue to be graceful must not have the arms and legs in the same action on both sides; they must be in different actions. In nature they always were in different actions. In sculpture, in painting, as in everything else, in art as in nature, without dissimilarity there could be no grace. That, too, was one of the laws of capital illumination.

7. The next specimen he would present to their notice was a capital letter at the beginning of a psalm. In this they would observe that animals, as well as natural leaves, were introduced. Up to this period nature had not been followed in writing to the same extent, but had been treated in the manner represented in the previous examples. The little Bible he had in his hand, in which the initial capital, of which the letter he exhibited was an enlargement, occurred, was a good example of the style of writing of the year 1230. Here, they would observe, the prevailing colours were

¹ [For Dante’s care in defining colours, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiv. § 49.]

² [This was Ruskin’s Psalter of St. Louis, for which see above, Introduction, p. lxix.]

³ [Robert, Count of Artois, brother of Louis IX., slain at the battle of Mansourah in Egypt, 1250; Philip II. reigned 1189-1223; Louis VIII. reigned 1223-1226.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]