Manuscript illumination materials tell the story of a lost artisanal ecosystem. A single medieval book could pass through a parchmenter, a scribe, a rubricator, a gilder, a painter, a binder, and a smith, each specialized in a distinct craft. The material and tool reconstructions are the product of that same collaborative model, central to Ars Pictoria’s mission: a range of Italian artisans contributed their own specialized knowledge to bring these materials back to life, in a project designed and curated by Gleb Shtyrmer for the San Marco Museum in Florence.
Introduction: The San Marco Museum Project
The San Marco Museum holds the world’s largest collection of Fra Angelico’s paintings and San Marco library Michelozzo built for Cosimo de’ Medici is widely regarded as the first public library since antiquity and a foundation of Florentine humanist thought. Its manuscripts are shown through The Library Unveiled (La Biblioteca svelata), a rotating exhibition series. New permanent displays in the library present more than 100 objects, illustrating materials and techniques behind illuminated manuscript production. The materials and reconstructions on display are the direct source for the research presented throughout this page.
What materials were used for manuscript illumination?
Manuscript illumination required a distinct set of materials for nearly every stage of a book’s production: parchment for the page, quills and ink for the text, gold leaf and gesso for gilding, and ground pigments bound with glair or gum arabic for the painted miniatures. Each stage demanded years of training, and was typically carried out by a specialized craftsman.
The material culture of illuminated manuscripts is extremely rich and multifaceted, spanning many centuries, with the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods marking its highest point. Every detail of the process was studied and refined over generations of artisans, who blended the classical Byzantine tradition with Western innovation and taste.
From the early Middle Ages through the fourteenth century, most illuminated manuscripts were produced inside monastic scriptoria. The most important center of manuscript decoration in Florence in this period was the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where the painter Lorenzo Monaco worked as a miniaturist from 1390.
Every section below deserves a study of its own; this article can only scratch the surface, aiming to introduce readers, both visually and conceptually, to the world of manuscript illumination. Techniques and materials also varied significantly across geography and period, so no single account can describe one universal process. What follows is necessarily a generalization, focused on the most prominent and significant aspects of each stage.
Part I. The Book
A book is, first of all, a physical object: pages prepared from animal skins to write and paint on. Once the writing and decoration were complete, the pages were folded, gathered, and bound to hold together for centuries of use.
Parchment
Parchment is a writing and painting support made from the skin of an animal, cleaned, dehaired, and stretched taut on a frame until dry. Unlike leather, it is not tanned, which keeps it receptive to ink; instead it is carefully scraped and polished to create a very thin sheet with an extremely smooth and uniform surface.
During late antiquity, the primary book format shifted from the scroll to the codex, or bound book. This transition required a parallel shift in writing support: from papyrus, made from a reed native to the Nile Delta that degraded quickly outside Egypt’s dry climate and did not fold well into a codex, to a far more elastic, smooth, and resilient material — parchment. This surface enabled increasingly elaborate decoration and calligraphy, stimulating innovation in both arts. 1
The Arab invasion of Egypt and neighboring countries in the 640s disrupted papyrus’s export across the Mediterranean, accelerating a shift to parchment, which became the primary material for books in the Latin West and remained so until paper gradually replaced it.
The words “parchment” and “vellum” are often used loosely today, but they have distinct historical meanings. Parchment is the general term for any skin that went through a specific manufacturing process (sheep, goat, calf, and other animals), while vellum, from the French vel (“calf”), originally denoted the finest quality, made specifically from calfskin. The finest quality, sometimes also called “virgin” parchment, was considered to be made specifically from newborn or stillborn calfskin, before the hair could develop and affect the texture of the page. This origin is difficult to confirm from the parchment itself, however, and remains disputed among scholars.
The book of trades (Ständebuch)
by Sachs, Hans, 1494-1576
Processing the skin: The skin was first washed in water, then soaked in a bath of lime, which after a few days loosened the hair enough for it to be scraped away over a wooden beam with a curved, double-handled knife. After a thorough rinse, the skin was laced around the edge of a rectangular frame with cord and stretched taut on all sides. While still damp and pliable, the parchmenter scraped it evenly thin with a distinctive crescent-moon-shaped blade, a lunellarium2, as one fifteenth-century Bohemian source calls it, since a curved edge could press evenly across a soft surface where a straight blade would simply cut through. The skin was remoistened with hot water and pared again several times, and finally left to dry fully under tension until it was as taut as a drumhead.
The process of parchment production was completed by smoothing its surface with a pumice stone while the parchment was still attached to the frame. An additional treatment called pouncing could then be done at this stage, or later by the scribes themselves once the parchment had been removed from the frame and trimmed for writing. The surface could still be greasy, horny, or overly absorbent; to correct this, scribes and illuminators rubbed it with powdered pumice, chalk, or resin (sandarac, rosin or colophony). This helped ensure even ink flow while writing.
Binding
The production of an illuminated manuscript required thousands of hours of specialized labor, and it was the role of binding to allow the extensive use of these books without compromising their contents.
Once the writing and decoration were complete on loose sheets of parchment, individual folded gatherings were sewn around a series of cords or leather bands running across the spine, known in Italian as nervi (“nerves”). These bands were then laced onto two wooden boards, forming the front and back covers.
The boards themselves were typically covered in leather, though velvet or silk appear on more luxurious commissions. For manuscripts meant for heavy, repeated use, a smith would provide metal fittings — corner pieces, bosses, and nails — whose role was to prevent damage and wear as the book was moved, handled, and opened.
Leather straps, known in Italy as bindelle, were fastened across the cover with corresponding metal clasps to hold the book shut and keep the parchment from warping under changes in humidity.
Original binding elements recovered from historical restoration work, shown at the San Marco Museum alongside the reconstructions:
Part II. The Text
Ruling
Ruling in a Gothic or Renaissance manuscript is a true precursor of the modern graphic design grid. The placement of text columns, column gaps, rubrics, capitals, and decorated initials was by no means casual; instead, it followed a deliberate system of proportions based on the size of each line of text, which was in turn determined by the desired letter size, and that letter size by the width of the quill’s nib. Just as today’s designers build a page layout around an intended font size, the scribe built the page around the pen.
Margins played several important roles beyond simple decoration. They gave the page visual negative space, keeping it from feeling cluttered; they served as a buffer zone for fingers gripping the edge to turn pages; and they left room to extend decoration outward from the text block. Scribes also used this space for running headers, corrections, comments, and sometimes entirely unrelated notes, drawings, or complaints, giving rise to an entire genre known as marginalia.
Multiple systems existed to rule a manuscript, but the most typical of the period was pricking holes along the outer margin of the page. To assure uniformity and speed up the process, this was usually done on the whole folded, assembled quire at once, so a single pass of the awl pricked through several stacked sheets together.
The next step was to open the pages and join up the pricked holes with the help of a ruler and a marking tool: a dry point (a blind stylus, leaving no visible mark, only an indent), a lead stylus, or even a pen and ink. Vertical lines were ruled with the help of a square, to guarantee perfect 90-degree alignment with the horizontal lines.
Ruling would require the following tools:
Writing
In Europe and the Middle East, pen and ink remained the primary writing technology: from ancient Greek and Roman scribes to medieval monks, Arabic calligraphers, and Jewish sofrim. Medieval scribes developed calligraphic hands of considerable sophistication, each demanding years of disciplined training.
Writing Pens
Writing pens of the period can be divided into two major groups: reed and quill pens. Both types often appear in medieval and Renaissance paintings and miniatures, in scenes of the evangelist saints, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint Gregory the Great, and other saints known for their writings. These saints are often depicted in their studies at a scriptorium desk, surrounded by objects related to the process of writing. These accurately rendered images are full of valuable details that help us understand what materials were used for writing and manuscript production of the period.
Reed Pens
The reed pen is one of the oldest writing tools, valued since antiquity for its ability to produce broad, expressive strokes. The two reconstructions on display at San Marco are made from Phragmites australis (common reed) and Arundo donax (giant reed), both common plants across Italy and the Mediterranean.
Renaissance humanists still favored the reed pen alongside the quill: Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was known to prefer it, as his poem and portraits by the greatest artists of the period attest.
Quill Pens
Quill pens, made from the primary flight feathers of large birds (swans, geese, and turkeys, the last introduced only after the New World was discovered), are an evolution of the reed pen. The shift from reed to quill was driven by a shift in writing support: from the rough surface of papyrus, which demanded a more robust nib, to the extremely smooth surface of parchment, which allowed for greater precision, finer strokes, and a more sophisticated calligraphic ductus. Since late antiquity, quills remained the dominant writing instrument of Western writers, draftsmen, and calligraphers for well over a millennium.
Pen Knife
The clean cut of the nib, its shape and size, was decisive for the quality of writing. Just like present-day pencils, quill and reed pens had to be cut and re-cut from time to time during the work, and scribes would prepare a substantial number of ready pens before starting.
Cutting quill and reed pens therefore was an important skill for a medieval scribe, and it required a very sharp penknife. This tool had multiple purposes: to hold the parchment firmly in place while writing, without leaving fingerprints or smudging the ink, and to erase mistakes by scraping off a thin layer of parchment along with the ink. The English word “erase” is closely linked to this last use of the penknife, which earned the Latin name rasorium, from radere, “to scrape.”
Inks
Black text on a white background guarantees the best reading experience. Just like printed books or even digital text on screens today, manuscripts were usually written with black ink on the bright support of parchment for optimal contrast. Recipe books and treatises offer a wide variety of ink recipes, which can be divided into two major groups: carbon and metallo-gallic inks.
Carbon ink, the more common of the two in antiquity, was made from soot collected from burning oils and resinous substances; it yielded an extremely stable black color that retains its power over millennia. Metallo-gallic ink was made through a chemical reaction between tannic acid, extracted from oak galls, and iron(II) sulfate, also known as green vitriol or copperas. This process yielded a deep black ink, slightly bluish at first, which over time turned more transparent and brown. Both inks used gum arabic as a binder and elasticizer, but while carbon ink remained on the surface, iron gall ink penetrated deeply through the parchment’s fibers, making it more resistant to mechanical damage.
In the Middle Ages, both inks were used, sometimes even on the same page: freshly written iron gall ink looked nearly as black as carbon ink, and the difference only became visible after decades or centuries.
Inkwell
A variety of inkwells existed, made from a range of materials and shapes. We can distinguish two main types: stationary and portable. For the San Marco display, I opted for the most characteristic kind for a medieval scriptorium: the inkhorn, an inkwell made from an animal horn, usually fitted into a socket in the surface of the scriptorium desk, or attached to its side. The horn’s natural conical shape allowed for optimal use of the ink, and in the Renaissance this same shape was imitated in horn-shaped glass vessels, installed the same way, as seen in Mantegna’s Saint Luke polyptych in the Brera and Ghirlandaio’s Saint Jerome fresco in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence.
Rubrication
While the main body of the text was written in black ink, certain elements were highlighted in color: headings, initials, comments, and the like. The color used was typically red, and the word “rubrication” derives from the Latin ruber (“red”). Rubrication was sometimes carried out by a specialized scribe, the rubricator. The second most common color used alongside red was azurite blue.
The term minium was used at different periods for either vermilion or red lead, and more generically for the red color used in rubrication. Alongside capital letters and other elements highlighted in red, decorative outlines were, in some cases, first outlined in the same red before final coloring. This close association led the words miniate (miniare, “to color with minium”) and miniature to broaden into general terms for manuscript decoration. The link of the word miniature to smallness is a later association rather than the word’s true root.
Writing and Drawing
Writing and drawing tools have always been intertwined. Artists drew either using the same materials, such as pen and ink or adapted writing materials to their specific needs, as in metalpoint drawing. This connection between calligraphy and drawing reached its height in the Renaissance, when calligraphic letterforms themselves became subjects of artistic study: Luca Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione (1509)3, illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, geometrically constructed the Roman capital alphabet, and Albrecht Dürer applied geometry and proportion to both Roman capitals and Gothic lettering in his own treatise, Underweysung der Messung (1525)4.
Part III. The Gold
This section is still being written; check back soon.
Gold leaf
TBD
Gilding with gesso
TBD
Alternative gilding methods
TBD
Part IV. The Miniature
Colors
Colors of the manuscript illuminator came from three sources:
- Mineral pigments, ground from stone and colored earth, including lapis lazuli, azurite, various ochres, and mineral cinnabar red.
- Alchemical pigments, manufactured through processes such as the corrosion of metals, as with lead white and copper green, or the fusion of mercury and sulfur to produce vermilion, an artificial equivalent of cinnabar.
- Organic pigments, extracted from plants and insects. Organic dyes could be used directly as translucent liquid extracts, called sucus, or precipitated onto an inert base, typically rock alum, to form a pigment known as a lake.
Most organic pigments are not light-fast, even when precipitated onto a mineral base, and would fade quickly under continuous exposure to UV light. Here illuminators had a real advantage over fresco painters, who worked with a far more limited palette, and even over panel painters: miniatures were kept inside closed codices, with any single page rarely exposed to the dim light of a church or library interior, and only for a short time.
Rock alum, a potassium aluminum sulfate refined from alunite mineral, was imported from the East during the Middle Ages and extracted near Rome from the second half of the 15th century onward. It was the most common mordant in the textile and leather industries, and played a central role in the production of the organic lakes used in manuscript illumination — so central, in fact, that the very word “illumination” likely derives from alluminare, the process of preparing colors with alum. The term famously occurs in Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto XI), where he addresses the miniaturist Oderisi da Gubbio: «Oh!», diss’io lui, «non se’ tu Oderisi, l’onor d’Agobbio e l’onor di quell’arte ch’alluminar chiamata è in Parisi?»
Binders and Brushes
Artists of the past were extremely aware of the materials they were using. They understood the properties of different pigments in depth, and period treatises and recipe books recommend different binders for different colors. Most often, the binder used for illumination was either gum arabic, egg glair (purified egg white), or egg yolk, sometimes combined with an elasticizer such as honey or a saturated sugar solution. In most cases only one binder was used for a given pigment, but some recipes, such as one listed in De arte illuminandi, call for a combination of egg glair, gum arabic, and honey together.
Today we are lucky to have art supply shops that offer a variety of high-quality natural and synthetic brushes. Historical brushes were also of excellent quality, but they were limited to round shapes and had a different aesthetic: they were crafted from natural animal hair, mounted on a quill barrel, and then attached to a wooden handle. Illumination, like panel painting, required fine, soft brushes; the hair of a Siberian squirrel, called vaio, was the material recommended by Cennino Cennini and is still in use today.
Additional Information
Recommended Reading
On Parchment:
- Daniel V. Thompson, “Medieval Parchment-Making,” The Library, s4-XVI, no. 1 (1935): 113–117. https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s4-XVI.1.113
- Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials of Medieval Painting (George Allen and Unwin, 1936), 24–30. https://archive.org/details/materialsofmedie0000dani/
- Michael L. Ryder, “Parchment: Its History, Manufacture and Composition,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 2 (1964): 391–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/00379816009513778
- Jiří Vnouček, “The Story of the Production of Parchment as Recorded in the Animal Skins of the Hamburg Bible,” Journal of Paper Conservation https://doi.org/10.1080/18680860.2024.2448103.
On Binding:
- Yale University Library, Preservation Department, Special Collections Conservation Unit, Bookbinding Terms, Materials, Methods and Models, accessed August 22, 2026, https://travelingscriptorium.com/2013/07/17/bookbinding-terms-materials-methods-and-models/
- Berna van Wijk, “Book Fittings: The Archaeological Reconstruction of (Post-)Medieval Books” (MA thesis, University of Groningen, 2019), https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15065.47206/1.
- [ITALIAN] Federico Macchi, ed., La legatura italiana dei secoli XV e XVI nel patrimonio della Biblioteca Palatina: guida alla mostra con selezione di opere (Complesso Monumentale della Pilotta, 2025), https://complessopilotta.it/2025/02/08/la-legatura-italiana-dei-secoli-xv-e-xvi-nel-patrimonio-della-biblioteca-palatina/.
- [ITALIAN] Carlo Pastena, Le parti del libro (Palermo: Regione Siciliana, Assessorato dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana, Dipartimento dei Beni Culturali e dell’Identità Siciliana, 2021), https://www.academia.edu/50160987/Le_parti_del_libro.
On Ruling:
- Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (Medieval Craftsmen series) (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 20–26.
- Christopher de Hamel, The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques (University of Toronto Press, 1994), 41–48.
- Donal Byrne, “Manuscript Ruling and Pictorial Design in the Work of the Limbourgs, the Bedford Master, and the Boucicaut Master,” The Art Bulletin 66, no. 1 (March 1984): 118–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3050396.
On Colors:
Notes
- Otto Pächt, Book Illumination in the Middle Ages: An Introduction, trans. Kay Davenport (Harvey Miller Publishers, 1986), 12. ↩︎
- The term is used in Liber viginti artium (Book of the Twenty Arts) by Paul of Prague, cited in “Medieval Parchment-Making” by Daniel V. Thompson. ↩︎
- Luca Pacioli, Divina proportione (Venice: A. Paganius Paganinus, 1509) ↩︎
- Albrecht Dürer, Unterweisung der Messung, ed. Alfred Peltzer (Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 1908) ↩︎