Silver Wheel scroll for Emidio di Arquata

I continue to not leave myself enough time to work on scrolls.

In the case of this one, I had planned more time, but failed to account for stressing about Kingdom Rapier Champs a week before this was due, and then the BoD threw a wrench into my timeline with their peerage poll - I’m heavily involved in the heraldry community, and spent a chunk of time editing the Pros and Cons document instead of working on this scroll. Ah, well, it still went out on time, but I’d like to be less stressed about it.

As usual, I did the entire thing myself because I haven’t figured out how to collaborate with other scribes yet (I’m always worried I’ll ruin their work), and this way my lack of time management isn’t impacting anyone other than myself.

The recipient for this one doesn’t have an EK wiki for me to mine for persona details, but based on the documentation for his name as registered (some benefits to being a herald!), I was aiming 14th century Italian, ish. The only other information I had was from the award recommendation - he’s a cook and event steward and general Thing Doer, and thus do we award him the Silver Wheel. This gave me a general direction for my text: period cooking texts. I know a lot of folks like to do the fun thing of “write a recipe about the recipient” as their text for cooks, but (a) I don’t feel creative enough for that, (b) it’s unique the first couple times it’s done but I don’t need to add to it becoming overdone, and (c) I like to pull books of hours or breviaries as my exemplars for the C&I, and it’s hard to make a recipe format look good on those. 

So I looked around for 14th century Italian cooking texts, and found the Liber de Coquina, which is a 14th century Italian recipe book, but which is entirely recipes without the sort of commentary that I feel able to pull from. Wikipedia told me it has an additional section, the Tractatus, which has additional introductory text; I found a translation of this online and thought that it would be just about perfect. The Tractatus is apparently generally thought to be by a French author rather than an Italian one, which works out given that the exemplar I pulled for the C&I is French.

I don’t have much else to say about the process of writing the text on this one; here’s a link to the original for you to compare with, and here’s the finished text:

Come, East, and hear the praise of Emidio di Arquata!

When he was fresh with the flower of youth, he travelled his barony’s different courts and stayed in various and famous kitchens, that is of abbots, knights, princes and magnates, in which he saw many varied diverse and delicious dishes prepared. His attention was drawn to these and he took great care that he should manage them in a fitting manner.

For those who manage and lead with skill, without superfluity and in a manner suited to the tasks at hand, are to be commended in merit and to be preferred in how much they strengthen and fortify the kingdom and barony and render us happy and joyful.

Therefore it must be noted that some Orders suit and are fit for the noble and hardworking who live a quiet life, and this is the Order of the Silver Wheel, given for many and varied labors.

Thus say we, King Matthew and Queen Fiamuin, at our Crown’s Arts and Sciences Champions Competition, AS LIX.

In picking an exemplar to work from for the C&I, it was once again important to me that I choose something relatively straightforward. I continue to be a fairly low-skill illuminator; I can handle geometric designs, flowers and plants without much in the way of shading, and cute weird marginalia that I can copy directly, but I can’t do gilding, humans (especially not ones that should look like the recipient), or anything that requires a lot of technical skill. This generally seems to mean 13th and 14th century texts are in my wheelhouse, so I started there, and in fairly short order found a gorgeous 13th century book of hours from France with lots of pages to choose from: https://search.digital-scriptorium.org/catalog/DS6341.

On the last few scrolls I’ve done, I’ve been dissatisfied with the overall look of the piece compared to the exemplar, regardless of how well I executed the individual pieces of it, and I wanted to start taking steps to improve on that. Part of my prep for this, then, was to look at the proportions of the text block in the exemplar (roughly 2:3 width:height), the line spacing (this looked 1:1 to me? But I’m still not sure I got that right), the total number of lines per page (20) and approximately how many sentences that was (8-ish), and whether the piece was centered in the page (no, but given that an award scroll isn’t a book, and I didn’t have border illumination to use to balance it visually for a modern viewer, I opted to center mine).

The hand is described by Digital Scriptorium as a gothic textualis semi-quadrata; I haven’t practiced my textura quadrata in a long time, but felt relatively confident in my ability to dust it off and draw fences. My rough estimate is that the hand in the exemplar has an x-height of approximately 4; I tried that and it somehow didn’t look right, so I adjusted a tiny bit upwards and I still don’t think I got it right, so I may play around with this in my between-assignments practice. Looking at my notes, after several iterations I ended up using a Mitchell 3 nib with a minim height of 6/32”, equal-spaced. This was the largest spacing I could manage and still fit twenty lines of text into my page at a 2:3 text block ratio, and I think it ended up okay.

Also in my prep for the calligraphy, I paid attention to the use of different forms of the letters in different contexts, and where the scribe used ligatures. In this case, that was long s at the beginnings and middles of words, with short s at the end of words; half-r after letters with a round bowl facing it (o, p, b); and ligatures of the long s with basically any letter that poked a straight ascender above the line (h, b, t, k). I noticed later that d-e also has a ligature in this hand, where the e shares a line with the bowl of the d, and there are a handful of places in this text where I could have made good use of that; next time! 

My execution of this hand was not as good as I’d have liked. I should have had more time to practice it, and to really nail down where to end my strokes so they all landed in the same place on the base line, and you can see that struggle particularly in the first half to two-thirds of the finished piece; I also feel like I kind of lost the plot on how the letter a worked, the further I got. I worried more than I probably should have about letter spacing; the original scribe does not appear to have worried about that at all, and I could probably claim that my inconsistencies are consistent with theirs. There are also a couple places where I tried to squish a whole word into the remaining space at the end of a line, instead of just splitting the dang word like I should have, but one of those was Her Majesty’s name and I really hate splitting names across lines. (There’s also one place where I straight-up forgot what word I was writing, wrote the wrong letter, and tried to salvage it; I think it came out reasonably well, and knowing how common that sort of mishap was in period, I’m not stressing over it.)

Where I’m really pleased on this scroll, though, is the illumination. This is, I think, the first time where I’ve done a mix of straight-up copying and also just vibing - it felt like too much work to find line fillers in the exemplar that perfectly matched the space I had available, or to perfectly match my white-work to the exemplar, so I just spent a long time looking at the various choices made in the exemplar and attempting to internalize the aesthetic in order to make up my own without it looking wrong.

(As an aside, this style of illumination really feels like the Bob Ross of period art - just draw some happy little boxes wherever you like, and fill them in! I dig it.)

For the capitals, I copied most of them but was unable to find a W, an H, or an F in the exemplar, so pulled those from Drogin and tried my best to modify them to fit the rest of them. (I chose to make less work for myself and have zero capitals in the text itself, outside of the initial caps for each sentence; as far as I can tell this choice is supported by the exemplar.) The caps is also where it really helped that I was trying to match the proportions of the original - it gave me extra margin besides the standard framing margin to work with and for those boxes to extend out a little bit, which to me feels like one of the defining features of this style of illumination.

I also split up a couple of the longer sentences at reasonable break-points to match the rhythm of the exemplar - I didn’t see any page with sentences longer than 3 lines, and some of mine would have been 5 or 6 lines, so I split them.

The rules of thumb I was working under for the illumination were as follows:

• line-fillers are (generally) boxes with straight edges - squares, rectangles, and diamonds, no circles or triangles
• capitals are in boxes that follow the edges of the letter, and may have rounded edges to match
• capitals and the decorations inside the line-filler boxes are gold; background of everything is blue and red equally split, alternating where possible (including inside/outside the capitals)
• whitework follows the edges of the space they’re decorating, at minimum
• additional whitework is mostly straight lines with a rounded end, and will often poke up into a rounded space through the center of it
• small rectangles are often divided into boxes and then further divided by diagonal lines, with the resulting gaps filled with a dot; boxes should generally be uniform in size and if they can’t be made to be so, they can be divided differently
• everything should be further outlined in black, in addition to the whitework outlines

Where this became most useful (since for the most part I could find similar shapes to what I was doing, and copy what had been done there, if I was unsure) was in my choice for the Silver Wheel badge. Since the badge for the Silver Wheel is fieldless and the wheel itself is white, it needs some kind of background or outline to stand out on a white page. I chose to put it in a box like everything else on the page, and follow the same rules as I’d been using for the rest of my decorations. However, I had nothing of a similar shape to use as my basis for the whitework, and this was possibly the most important piece on the entire scroll to get right; I’m very pleased with what I came up with.

There’s one line-filler box where I’m not pleased with what I came up with, as it breaks a couple of these rules (no gold decorations, and the additional whitework besides the outline doesn’t follow a pattern that I see anywhere in the original), and in the very first capital on the page I deliberately broke from pattern to put a fish outline in, since the recipient’s heraldry has fish on it, but otherwise I think I did pretty well. I did also neglect to outline anything in black, both because I was out of time and because I'm fairly confident I would have ruined it all, had I tried.

I need to figure out a better brush to use for whitework, and a better way of keeping my gouache at the correct working consistency; this was okay but not ideal. As usual, my paints are from Archangel Arts - ultramarine, cadmium red deep, and titanium white; the gold is imitation shell gold from Guild Mirandola. I didn’t keep good track of how much time I spent on this, but probably in the 12-15 hours ballpark? I wasn’t expecting to be really pleased with it, based on how my calligraphy felt like it was going at the start, but in the end I’m actually quite pleased with this, and it sounded like the recipient also is, which is ultimately the goal.