O Ornamental Capitals

Ornamental Capitals

In earlier times, when materials such as vellum or paper were expensive, scribes or typesetters beginning a new section of text, such as a chapter division, did not start on a fresh page, but marked the change with a large, decorated letter distinct from the others in its scale, colour, flourishes and elaboration.

Manuscript and book historians have identified two main types of ornamental letter: the decorated initial that introduces a new section of text and carries visual embellishments; and the historiated initial that includes figures or narrative episodes illustrative of the passage that follows. There are numerous examples of both types in books owned by the College.

The decorated initial has enjoyed the longer life. It can be found already in the College’s Book of Hours (see the entry under ‘I’), where in addition to fully illuminated leaves, there are numerous beautiful capital letters limned in rich, vibrant colours. One series of capitals are rendered in lapis lazuli blue worked with white body colour; others deploy the technique called rubrication, the use of red. In one of the rubricated capitals, the limner has included the head of a dragon with fangs and forked tongue, while in a lapis capital, we see an elegant bird; such animals are known as cadels – meaning a ‘gift’, or a ‘little extra’. The examples from printed books shown here range in date from the Renaissance to the 19th century, including work printed in a medieval style by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press.

Historiated initials were intended to serve more than a textual function, providing visual illustrations of key figures or narrative episodes in the passages they announced. For limners in the Middle Ages, the story dictated which figures to include within the frame of the letter. In the age of print, similar character or narrative scenes were cut into woodblocks and integrated into the so-called forme, the block of assembled metal type and blank ‘furniture’ from which impressions were made. However, because printing stock was expensive, printers did not trouble to cut new capitals for every job, but re-used old letters: indeed, some printing houses kept the same letters for generations. This meant that figures and stories within initial capitals appear indiscriminately in new contexts, regardless of their relevance to the text. We see this in a magnificent historiated initial ‘I’ used by Holinshed in the preface to his Chronicles, where the text begins ‘It is dangerous, (gentle Reader), to range in so large a fielde…’. But accompanying this is a scene of God the Father presiding over Eden taken from a Latin Bible where Genesis opens with ‘In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram…’. Other examples reproduced here are two ‘A’ letters, one showing God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, the other Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac; a ‘B’ with the angel confronting Balaam and his talking donkey from the Book of Numbers; a large ‘T’ with the ancient Greek navigator Timosthenes; a letter ‘N’ with the Old Testament Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem with trowel in one hand and weapon in the other; and ‘I’ (really a ‘J’) showing Jacob’s dream with angels ascending and descending a heavenly ladder. Harder to decipher is the letter ‘O’, which shows the Apocryphal heroine Judith slipping a decapitated head into a sack. The name of her victim, the wicked Holofernes, was sometimes also given as ‘Oloferne’.