Bookbinding and Illumination

For centuries, illumination and artistic bookbinding were the arts that turned the manuscript book into an object of prestige, devotion and power. At a time when every codex was copied by hand on parchment, the page became the support of an autonomous pictorial creation — inhabited initials, foliate borders, miniature scenes — while the binding protected and dignified the whole. In Portugal, these two practices ran in parallel from the founding of the nation down to the Ancien Régime, leaving behind some of the most remarkable pieces of Portuguese decorative arts.

From the monastic scriptorium to the Romanesque codex

The production of the illuminated book was born in the monasteries, where the scriptorium brought together copyists and illuminators. The great Benedictine and Augustinian centres — Lorvão, Alcobaça, Santa Cruz de Coimbra — concentrated the copying of bibles, commentaries and liturgical books. The crowning work of this period is the Apocalypse of Lorvão, completed in 1189 and signed by the scribe Egeas: it is the only copy of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana made in Portugal in the Middle Ages, today classified as a UNESCO Memory of the World. Its figures of firm line and intense colouring reveal a Mozarabic-Romanesque vocabulary of great originality.

The medieval technique relied on precious materials. Parchment, obtained from the skins of sheep, goat or calf, was prepared with lime and scraped until translucent. The pigments came from minerals and plants — lapis lazuli for the blues, malachite, cinnabar, saffron — bound with egg white or gum. Gold was applied as leaf over a ground of gesso and glue, then burnished with an agate stone until it mirrored the light.

To illuminate was not to illustrate: it was to give the written word a luminous body, making the codex at once a sacred text, an object of worship and an affirmation of the one who commissioned it.

The Manueline apogee and the books of hours

The reign of King Manuel I marks the highest point of Portuguese illumination. The reform of the royal archives gave rise to the Leitura Nova, dozens of parchment volumes copying the documents of the chancery, opened by sumptuous frontispieces where the armillary sphere, the royal arms and the Manueline ornamental grammar intertwine with the vocabulary of the Renaissance. The finest names in the art of the book worked on these frontispieces, among them António de Holanda, Álvaro Pires and António Godinho.

In parallel flourished the book of hours, the private devotional of the nobility. Pieces such as the Book of Hours known as that of King Manuel, heavily indebted to the Flemish school of Bruges and the circle of Simon Bening, show how Portuguese taste absorbed the Nordic currents through trade in Antwerp. By the early seventeenth century, the priest Estêvão Gonçalves Neto would sign, in the Missal of the Academy of Sciences, what is considered the most perfect example of national miniature painting. This visual culture is in dialogue with the goldsmithing and painting of the same period, sharing themes, models and patrons.

Bookbinding as an art

Once the work of copying and illumination was complete, the codex received its binding. In the monastic workshops and, later, in the royal libraries, the gatherings were sewn on cords and covered with leather mounted on wooden boards. From the end of the fifteenth century, gold tooling spread — the technique of impressing gold leaf hot onto leather with heated tools — of Islamic origin, which made it possible to compose spines and covers with stamps, rolls and fleurons. The great libraries, civil and ecclesiastical, had their holdings bound in a uniform manner, conferring material unity on entire collections and making the binding itself an indicator of status. These traditional hand-bookbinding workshops still preserve, in Portugal today, a centuries-old craft tied to the conservation of documentary heritage.