The court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II produced nothing more amazing than the "Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta", a brilliant amalgamation of two arts - calligraphy and miniature painting.

The project began when Georg Bocskay, a pre-eminent scribe) assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historic scripts ranging from the latest Italic and humanist writing to antique Roman and German Gothic.

Years later, at Rudolf's behest, court artist Joris Hoefnagel filled the spaces on each manuscript page with images of fruit, flowers, insects and other natural minutiae. This marvel of the Central European Renaissance is now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.










This last not being an original, but reproduced by the SCA scribe Kayleigh McWhyte

I'm lucky enough to own the entire copy of Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta, in it's own hard slipcase.

As you can see, for many pages there's a painting, and there's some gorgeous calligraphy.

An idea for a project would be to needlepaint the picture, and do the adjacent calligraphy and put it together as one piece. (I could paint the picture but I like the idea of combining the two mediums.).

That would be cool, hey?

More pages can be seen by Image Googling "Mira Calligraphiae"