When not historiated, the initial had for about two hundred years been most often made up of, or filled with, spiraling plant tendrils, often with animals or men caught up in them, so the development to the tree was a relatively easy step.
42.
Compositions usually had little depth, and needed to be flexible to be squeezed into the shapes of historiated initials, column capitals, and church tympanums; the tension between a tightly enclosing frame, from which the composition sometimes escapes, is a recurrent theme in Romanesque art.
43.
The Museo di Arte Sacra in San Gimignano preserves a choirbook ( Graduale LXVIII ) with a number of historiated initials attributed to Niccol?( Adoration the Magi, Presentation Pentecost, Trinity, Assumption of the Virgin, San Gimignano adored by five monks, San Gimignano Enthroned ).
44.
Produced in the 1320s in Suffolk county in southeastern England, the small 252-leaf volume contains 46 " historiated " _ enlarged and illustrated _ initials, 14 larger miniature paintings _ mainly from the life of King David _ and hundreds of lushly decorated borders and marginal scenes.
45.
Historiated initials or full-page illuminations were also used to mark the beginnings of the three major divisions of the Psalms, or the various daily readings, and may have helped users navigate to the relevant part of the text ( medieval books almost never had page numbers ).
46.
Extremely detailed geometric, interlace, and stylised animal decoration, with forms derived from secular metalwork like brooches, spread boldly across manuscripts, usually gospel books like the Book of Kells, with whole carpet pages devoted to such designs, and the development of the large decorated and historiated initial.
47.
The Historiated Bible, the Letter from Heaven, the Wanderings through Heaven and Hell, the numerous Adam and Cross legends, the religious poems of the " Kalki perehozhie " and other similar productions owe their dissemination to a large extent to the activity of the Bogomils of Bulgaria, and their successors in other lands.
48.
The first appearance of such figures in a " Crucifixion " is in a historiated initial in the Drogo Sacramentary of c . 830, but though Ecclesia already has most of her usual features already present, the figure representing the Jews or the Old Covenant is here a seated white-haired old man.
49.
This habit of mind was an essential component of both the Romanesque and Gothic styles, where forms of Anglo-Saxon invention such as the inhabited and historiated initials became more important than they ever had in Anglo-Saxon art itself, and works like the Gloucester Candlestick ( c . 1110 ) show the process in other media.
50.
In contrast to the " Geneva Bible " and the " Bishops'Bible ", which had both been extensively illustrated, there were no illustrations at all in the 1611 edition of the Authorized Version, the main form of decoration being the historiated initial letters provided for books and chapters together with the decorative title pages to the Bible itself, and to the New Testament.
