‘is a shame that there was but only one small letter T among all of the wonderful illuminated letters I found in a 16th Century French manuscript. The pages were photographed and displayed on a university website and thankfully they have made the beautiful pages available for folks like me to share with you.
But, as you can see it is a fairly nice illustration. Like most book pages from the 1500s, this one was entirely done by hand. Imagine, every letter of text, every bit of punctuation and every decoration like this small, illuminated letter T, were done by hand. Messing up, meant starting 2 pages over for this work appears to have used both sides of each piece of paper.
The work included more dramatic larger letters and smaller letters, like this one, that were about the same size as the rest of the page text.
I thought it best to leave this letter image in pretty much the same condition I found it in. You can actually see the penciled guidelines the artist used to keep the main text in a nice straight line. The little bits of ink smudges and that missed corner were as it appeared all those years ago. I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to straighten the box and letter or if you would want to remove the surrounding material.
This image is copyright free and in the public domain anywhere that extends copyrights 70 years after death or at least 120 years after publication when the original illustrator is unknown.
