Manuscript illumination has always fascinated me because those artists - most of whom remain anonymous - given the final task of illustrating a leaf (page) of already-inscribed text worked under some heavy creative constraints. The scribe, you see, had already determined where the image would go, as well as how much room for painting remained to be allotted to the illuminator. Additionally, the hapless artist absolutely could not screw things up at this point. A painting would go on the page (for which some animal had already been skinned), no precious metals or costly lapis lazuli would be wasted and there would be no turning back or major revisions once the painting had begun.

By the Fourteenth Century, your basic Northern European illuminator was faced each day with rows of these leaves, set out side by side like so many bingo cards, each of which might need a spot of blue. He'd add that methodically until it was time to switch to crimson, white, gold leaf, basic black ink or what have you; pick any color made with hot dung, burnt bones, alkali metals, lead or arsenic. (It was an incredibly toxic, tedious, manual four-color printing process that nonetheless saved great quantities of expensive pigments.) It seems a bit amazing now that illuminators would have the ambition left with which to add artistic innovation, but innovate they did and so provided us with evidence - once again - of the marks of true artists.

The Getty Museum's exhibition Landscape in the Renaissance (on view from August 1 to October 15, 2006) focuses on one particular Renaissance innovation, the development of landscape painting in art. More difficult to create than might be suspected, a landscape may contain varying perspectives and vanishing points, along with some problematic depictions of vegetation and/or moisture. It was no quick, easy or solo task figuring out how to replicate such realism in two dimensions. Please join Stan Parchin in another of his marvelously descriptive features and explore the image gallery he's written for Landscape in the Renaissance. Please also join me in saying, "Thank you, Stan."