Style combination · Pairs well

Armenian Manuscript Illumination × Mir iskusstva Book Art

Bilibin's circle turned medieval ornament into the borders and initials of a modern book; follow that route to use canon-table arcades as a frame for new text rather than copying a sacred page.

From the research on Armenian Manuscript Illumination

Mix them and make something Armenian Manuscript Illumination Mir iskusstva Book Art

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Mir iskusstva Book Art, their arrangement from Armenian Manuscript Illumination, the finish from Mir iskusstva Book Art. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Armenian Manuscript Illumination Mir iskusstva Book Art

Type from Armenian Manuscript Illumination: Brush & pen calligraphy
Ornamented display
Colour from Armenian Manuscript Illumination: Jewel & metallic
Full polychrome
Form from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Stylised figuration
Borders & frames
Composition from Armenian Manuscript Illumination: Framed panels
Central symmetry
Surface from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Armenian Manuscript Illumination

Soirée

Uncial Antiqua, standing in for Erkatagir ('iron letters'), the uncial held to be Mesrop Mashtots's original form of the alphabet of 405, used for manuscript text from the 5th to the 13th century and still preferred for inscriptions

Text · Mir iskusstva Book Art

The graphic idiom of the St Petersburg World of Art circle (journal 1898–1904, exhibitions until Paris 1927) and the book artists around it. Ivan Bilibin's state-printed, lithographed fairy tales set firmly outlined, flat-washed pictures and text inside folk-ornament borders drawn from lubki, crafts and icons; Benois and Somov revived the eighteenth century of Versailles and old Petersburg in vignettes and rococo scenes. Both branches made the book one ensemble of cover, headpiece, initial, plate and tailpiece, in watercolour, gouache or black ink rather than oil.

Libre Caslon Text; Mir iskusstva Book Art used Ivan Bilibin's hand-drawn cover titles and illuminated initials in an Old Russian manner, drawn as part of the page and Typeset Cyrillic text in a single block inside an ornamental border, opened by an illuminated initial and closed by a tailpiece

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Armenian Manuscript Illumination, with a counter-accent from Mir iskusstva Book Art. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Armenian Manuscript Illumination Mir iskusstva Book Art

#f0e6cf ground · 36%
#2b1e16 ink · 14%
#c0392b accent · 18%
#c99a3a accent · 14%
#1e3a8f accent · 10%
#2e7d5b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #f0e6cf;
  --ink: #2b1e16;
  --accent-1: #c0392b;
  --accent-2: #c99a3a;
  --accent-3: #1e3a8f;
  --accent-4: #2e7d5b;
  --font-display: "Uncial Antiqua", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}

Use it with care

Armenian Manuscript Illumination: These are Gospel books, lectionaries and Bibles of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and their crosses, evangelist symbols, portraits of Christ and the saints and holy names keep their sacred meaning; do not use them as texture, logos or decoration on trivial products. Armenian letter art, including ornamental letters made of birds, animals and people, is living heritage (UNESCO Representative List, 2019) practised by calligraphers, carpet weavers, embroiderers and jewellers, so commission or collaborate with Armenian artists rather than lifting motifs, and have any Armenian text written or checked by a fluent reader instead of assembling letters as pseudo-script. Manuscripts were seized, scattered or lost in the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Zeyt'un Gospels among them (its canon tables were removed and sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1994; a 2015 agreement acknowledged the Armenian Church as their owner while the leaves stayed at the Getty), and several of the scriptoria (Vaspurakan, Cilicia) now lie outside Armenia: credit the work as Armenian, naming its Byzantine models, and the Syriac ones of the earliest books, where they matter, and do not fold it into a generic 'Byzantine' or 'Oriental' style.

Mir iskusstva Book Art: This 'Russian' folk look is a refined, partly state-commissioned idiom of the imperial capital, assembled by professional artists from northern peasant crafts, lubki and icons: do not present it as timeless ethnic Russian folk art or as a neutral emblem of the Russian state, and keep icon-derived holy figures out of trivial uses. Its makers were not all Russian: Heorhiy Narbut, for example, became rector of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and designed the Ukrainian People's Republic's banknotes and stamps, so credit artists by their own identities. Benois (d. 1960) and Dobuzhinsky (d. 1957) remain in copyright in the EU and Russia (life plus 70 years, so at least until 2031 and 2028), while Bilibin (d. 1942), Somov (d. 1939) and Narbut (d. 1920) are in the public domain there: draw new borders, figures and lettering rather than reproducing their pages. Somov's Le Livre de la Marquise is explicitly erotic, above all the 1918 edition, so keep its plates out of children's or general-audience pastiche.