Roman d’Alexandre
A late thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Roman d'Alexandre, a French verse romance about Alexander the Great, made around 1290 by an unknown scribe and painter, probably for a secular noble reader. The pictures are painted miniatures in gold, blue, red and green set in framed panels beside columns of gothic black-letter text, showing knights in mail, armoured battles, a sleeping king tended by attendants, and a crowned ruler in a boat or castle. A designer could take the compact panel-and-text layouts, the flat gold-leaf borders and the saturated medieval palette.
