Study of the material and formal characterisctics of illuminated manuscripts from the XII-XVI centuries

Abstract

Although manuscripts are one of the few sources of information we have about our ancestors, there is a great lack of information about them. Within manuscripts there is a category known as illuminated manuscripts in which the text is accompanied by decorations with metals, such as gold or silver. Due to the lack of techniques and materials at the time, the artists responsible for these works were few and far between, and all of them had very well-defined rules for their work. The main objective of this work is to carry out a study of the chemical composition of the inks of the decorations and the formal characteristics of the illuminated manuscript Liber Horarum, Ms.1859, from the CRAI of the University of Barcelona, dated between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century and written in the area of Flanders. The first part of the study will be carried out using the X-ray fluorescence technique (XRF) to determine the pigments used, while the second part of the study will consist of parameterizing the most relevant formal categories of the manuscript. Once the manuscript has been studied, a chemometric study of the chemical compositions and a formal study will be carried out in order to determine the number of techniques used in the production of the manuscript.