3/28/2023 0 Comments Medieval manuscripts silk![]() ![]() They stitched these together around the edges to form a little skeleton to build the rest of the bag around. ![]() Whoever made the bag, likely in Italy in the 17th century, started by deconstructing a volume and snipping the bifolia-the sheets of parchment that were folded to make the pages-into four tapered triangles. In the belly of the bag, where one might expect just fabric, there is instead text-four parchment fragments, cut from a medieval manuscript. Between the seams and under the stitches, there’s something faded and faint, but unmistakable: a blue “Q” tucked between two stems, a stylized red “M” near one edge, rows and rows of tidy, brownish letters. But things get more interesting when one pries the lustrous little parcel open. This is also corroborated by their presence in many stone inscriptions where they would have served no functional purpose whatsoever.The purse is plenty pretty on the outside: emerald silk, embroidered with dainty yellow, purple, and peachy-pink blooms, arcing out of metallic vases. All in all, there are clearly cases when the grid lines do not serve an immediate role but are created or preserved to be part of the layout design. This scenario, however, does not explain why the lines had to be so prominent. Nevertheless, as far as I can see from the online photographs of the verso of the scroll, the stitchings were done over brush-written characters and it is possible that the grid lines were used in the process of writing the text with a brush, before having those embroidered. Similar to sutras written on paper, the text is guided by vertical and horizontal grid lines, regardless of the fact that the artisan embroidering the characters probably did not need such devices to keep the characters straight. ![]() Manuscript Or.8212.480 from LoulanĪn even more interesting case is Pelliot chinois 4500 (see Plate 3), a silk manuscript with an apocryphal sutra where the characters are embroidered onto the material. They were certainly intended to be part of the layout. For example, in Or.8212/480 in Plate 2, an early fragment from Loulan (3rd-4th century?), the lines are extremely well pronounced and go well beyond seving as guidelines for the calligrapher. Having said that, there are cases where the grid lines are very strong and were obviously intended to remain highly visible. In other words, their functionality lasted only while the text was being written and after that they lost their use. This suggests that they were not strictly speaking part of the design but rather a trace of the process of creating the sutra. This way, they do not dominate the layout but remain in the background, at times staying almost invisible. In reality, they are written with a thin brush using diluted ink. In most cases the grid lines are very faint and appear to our modern eye as if drawn with a pencil. For this very reason, there are no horizontal grid lines except for the two main ones which enclose the text from the top and bottom. Grid lines in manuscript Or.8210/S.230Įven though there is usually an even number of characters per line, these are not aligned horizontally, as they vary in size and spacing according to the rhythm of the calligraphy. ![]()
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