However, the term has come to refer to any illustrated work of the period.
Illustration of two women from the Arnold of Villanova manuscriptThe term illumination originally referred to medieval book illustrations using gold and silver, which would illuminate the often religious subjects of the paintings. New paper production methods created in Italy in the late fourteenth century dropped the price of paper, setting the conditions for its preference at the arrival of printing in 1450. Finally, the manuscripts in the collection from the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are on paper. The Rhazes manuscript, copied in the early 1400s from a 1388 translation, is composed of both paper and parchment, an example of the transition period between the two mediums. All three of the fourteenth-century manuscripts in the Reynolds-Finley Library are on vellum. Though parchment can be made from a variety of animal skins, calfskin, also known as vellum, provided the best quality medium for medieval manuscripts and was still preferred by many for high end early printed books during the Renaissance. Parchment, or stretched animal skin, was used more frequently than paper in manuscript production until the fifteenth century. This illustration of three people seated at dinner comes from Arnold of Villanova's treatise on winemaking (Italy, 14th century), which is on vellum.As Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham explain in their Introduction to Manuscript Studies, "Parchment is literally the substrate upon which virtually all knowledge of the Middle Ages has been transmitted to us" (p.
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