Restoring a masterpiece to its original glory
	Reproducing the depth of colour and the richness of gold in William de Brailes’s work was made all the more challenging because some of the gold had been scraped from the surface of the leaves centuries ago, probably for recycling into another manuscript. Months of preparation and painstaking application went into this restoration alone.

New scholarship in a comprehensive commentary volume

Professor Nigel J. Morgan has been fascinated with William de Brailes's illuminations for many years. When The Folio Society approached him to commission a commentary volume for this project, he relished the opportunity to study them more extensively. Alongside a detailed analysis of each image, he compares de Brailes's treatment of biblical subjects with that of his contemporaries. He also provides insight into the importance of medieval Oxford as a centre of manuscript production. How de Brailes’s Psalter came to be lost is not known, with the surviving leaves only emerging from obscurity in the 19th century. Professor Morgan traces their history from that point: they were bought and sold by various collectors, but ultimately came to prominence because of the interest of Sydney Cockerell. In 1932, Cockerell managed to acquire six leaves for the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge where he was Director. Later scholarship has identified another leaf – now held by the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York – as belonging to the same original manuscript. Professor Morgan’s book provides a comprehensive and valuable contribution to the published work on medieval manuscripts in general and to the de Brailes leaves in particular.

Dear Reader,

Anybody who has the privilege of handling a medieval manuscript is sure to be struck by the tactile quality of its leaves. As thin as paper, but quite different to the touch, the vellum or parchment on which illuminations were painted is extremely resilient – one reason why so many of these precious books have survived for so long. Publishers of fine facsimiles go to extraordinary lengths to match the quality of vellum, but there’s no question that the real thing is inimitable.

So why not use real vellum? After all, it is still being made, using methods that medieval craftsmen would have recognised – soaked, stretched and scraped over and over again to produce a fine, firm surface. Of course the cost would be enormous, but that is not all. It is fiendishly hard to print in colour on vellum. Attempts have been made occasionally, but with poor results – certainly nothing like the quality we would want for a true facsimile of an illuminated manuscript.

In 2005 I attended a magnificent exhibition, The Cambridge Illuminations, where my eye was drawn to six superlative illuminations made by the English artist William de Brailes. De Brailes is a fascinating figure because we know so much about him – so much in relative terms, that is, since most medieval artists are anonymous. In the case of de Brailes, however, we know amongst other things that he lived in Oxford, was married to a lady named Celena, and that around the year 1240 he worked on a magnificent series of illustrations for a Psalter. The book itself is now lost, and only seven leaves survive – six in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the seventh in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. It seemed a great shame that these magnificent leaves were unlikely ever to be reproduced in facsimile because there were not enough of them to justify a book.

At around the same time I was told by Andrea Albertini of Grafiche Damiani in Bologna that he was developing a new technique for colour printing on real vellum, with absolute fidelity of colour. From time to time he sent samples of his efforts, and I had serious doubts whether he could bring it off. Then suddenly he made a breakthrough, and the effect was electric – a huge difference in quality from any facsimile I’d seen before. There was only one drawback: Andrea ruefully acknowledged that the cost would make reproducing an entire book prohibitively expensive.

The memory of those lovely leaves in Cambridge resurfaced, and I set about exploring the viability of reproducing them in this way. I showed Andrea’s trials to Stella Panayotova at the Fitzwilliam Museum and asked her if we could publish a vellum facsimile of the de Brailes leaves. Stella was delighted by the idea and cleared permission with the Fitzwilliam’s directors; she also told me about the seventh surviving leaf, in the Pierpont Morgan Library, and helped us obtain permission to reproduce this as well.

Centuries ago the Psalter had been cut up and at some point much of the gold leaf was scraped away from the illuminations, perhaps for reuse on another commission. However, even in the damaged areas enough remained to show us where the gilding and the finely patterned tooling had once been. Backed by the Fitzwilliam we took the decision to recreate the tooled gold in our facsimile, as well as cleaning up other minor damage. This process of digital cleaning, repair and restoration took up nearly a year and involved frequent trips to Cambridge and New York.

At last the printing process began. The vellum had to be prepared with a base layer that would hold the colour – in essence the same process as that followed by medieval artists. After that the colour could be printed, and the progress of the valuable vellum sheets through the press was unbelievably slow. Gold was applied in two stages – a base layer to raise the gold slightly above the level of the vellum – just as on the original leaves – and then the foil itself. Finally the gold was over-printed to replicate the patina of age and then carefully impressed with a dye made to exactly match the original tooling. Just 480 copies of the leaves have taken months to create – remarkable when you consider that thousands of books can be printed in an hour on modern commercial presses. The leaves are now all cut to size and mounted in their simple frames of archival board.

A project like this has never been undertaken before, and none of us knew what to expect. I can only say that all those involved – Grafiche Damiani, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Nigel Morgan, the author of the commentary volume and everyone at The Folio Society – are delighted, and perhaps just a little relieved, that it turned out so well.

It is hard for photography to do justice to the finished leaves. Although we have included a brochure describing the illuminations and their history, we decided that the best way to show how unusual and how special these leaves are would be to film some of the stages in their making. We have enclosed a copy of this film on a dvd, and I hope you enjoy discovering more about what has been a journey of discovery for all of us. Naturally, I also hope you will order Leaves from a Psalter for yourself – an unprecedented project. I look forward to hearing what our members think of it.

Yours sincerely

Joe Whitlock Blundell
Production Director

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