Bible
A thirteenth-century illuminated Bible, made anonymously around 1280 and probably in France, likely for a monastic or clerical reader. The pictures are small figures set inside painted initials and foliage scrolls, with haloed saints, angels and a monk in black habit, all in blue, vermilion, green and gold on cream vellum. A designer could take from them the compact, interlocking logic of medieval initial framing, where figures sit inside curling leaf-and-bar borders in a limited palette.
