Illuminated Manuscripts

Paintings you were meant to hold, turn, and read.

Before the printed book, the most lavish European painting was often bound and portable — gold-leafed miniatures opened in private, read by candlelight, turned page by page. These are among the best-preserved colors to survive the Middle Ages, precisely because they spent centuries shut away from the light.

Lean in to a Bute Master initial or Joris Hoefnagel's hallucinatory natural history: figures the size of a thumbnail, painted with a single-hair brush. The whole history of painting, in miniature and in mint condition.