An “Illuminating” Look into Book Mounts
There are golden treasures on display in Truth and Beauty, but they’re not the sunken treasures of a pirate ship; they’re hand-illustrated books with exquisitely crafted bindings.
Two of these books date to the early twentieth century, though they hearken back to the tradition of illustrated manuscripts from the medieval period. Passionate about a return to craft, Pre-Raphaelites and artists like William Morris (British, 1834–1896) eschewed modern mechanized manufacturing in favor of the hand production of decorative objects.
Hand and Soul, written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (British, 1828–1882), tells the tale of a fictional early Italian artist. This sumptuously decorated volume was made by Francis Sangorski (British, 1875–1912) and George Sutcliff (British, 1878–1943) over the period of 1904–1911. Rather than printed, the text was handwritten on vellum pages and illuminated with beautiful imagery and decorative borders in tempera paint and gold leaf. The volume was bound by hand as well, and its deep green leather covering features an elaborate display of three-dimensional jeweled pomegranates set amid hand-gilded foliage. The manuscript pays homage to its medieval-art predecessors and to the exacting craftsmanship of Morris’s Kelmscott Press, which published the original text in 1895.