Summary
Popular culture has disseminated a mystified image of medieval manuscript illumination and preconceptions have often been perpetuated by traditional historiography. However, in reality little is known yet about how, where and who created the astonishing miniatures that have survived until our time. Were they monks or secular professionals? Men or women? How many individuals participated in a workshop? How was labour divided? Did illuminators specialise or also painted other media, like panels or murals? Were painters working in a stable scriptorium or were they itinerant? Did they work in a dedicated space or in multifunctional areas of the monasteries, such as cloisters? Were the painting materials and techniques rather standardised or open to external influences and innovation? This talk aims to propose a multidisciplinary approach to address these questions, building on the ground-breaking experience of the MINIARE project, that systematically analysed hundreds of illuminated manuscripts across a wide geographical and chronological span. New light on the medieval painting practices will be shed by combining: 1)technical examination of the illuminated codices as artefacts, including the analysis of painting materials, 2)archaeological evidence of pictorial activity in monastic and urban contexts, 3)study of medieval written sources and 4)iconographic analysis of representations of painters.