Celtic Revival Illumination and Mir iskusstva Book Art: a style combination

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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.

Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering Mir iskusstva Book Art

Type from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Hand-lettering
Ornamented display
Colour from Mir iskusstva Book Art: Flat fields
Earth & mineral
Form from Celtic Revival Illumination: Geometric tessellation
Abundant decoration
Composition from Celtic Revival Illumination: Framed panels
Central symmetry
Surface from Celtic Revival Illumination: Flat

02

The type

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

Display · Mir iskusstva Book Art

Souvenir

Federant; 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

Text · Celtic Revival Illumination

Ornament and lettering of the Celtic Revival in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, modelled on Insular gospel books such as Kells and on carved stone crosses. Text sits in closed, symmetrical frames of knotwork, key pattern, spirals and interlaced beasts, its letters drawn in insular forms, knotted into the ornament or set in Gaelic type, in deep flat colours on vellum or paper. Its makers carried it from illuminated books and addresses to a nationalist memorial book, Gaelic League mastheads, magazines, the Irish Free State's first stamps and Liberty silver.

EB Garamond; Celtic Revival Illumination used Hand-drawn lettering after the majuscule and half-uncial of the Insular manuscripts, drawn into the ornament and Archibald Knox's interlaced Celtic lettering, drawn so densely into the ornament that it must be studied to be read

03

The colours

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

Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering Mir iskusstva Book Art

#efe6cf ground · 36%
#1b1a17 ink · 14%
#c99a3a accent · 18%
#b8342a accent · 14%
#3d5a85 accent · 10%
#3e6b4f accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #efe6cf;
  --ink: #1b1a17;
  --accent-1: #c99a3a;
  --accent-2: #b8342a;
  --accent-3: #3d5a85;
  --accent-4: #3e6b4f;
  --font-display: "Federant", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "EB Garamond", serif;
}

Use it with care

Celtic Revival Illumination & Lettering: Its models are Christian gospel books and crosses, and many of its emblems are national and partisan: Leabhar na hAiséirghe is a memorial to the republican dead of 1916–23, including the Civil War, and the Celtic Cross stamp was adapted from a Sinn Féin label, so do not use these as neutral 'Irish' decoration where nationalist imagery is contested, as in Northern Ireland. The 1922 Map of Ireland stamp left out the border, and some in Northern Ireland and Britain read it as a claim to the northern counties, so an undivided map of the island is itself a political statement. A square cross interlocked with or surrounded by a circle is a widespread white-supremacist symbol, while the traditional Celtic cross has a long vertical shaft, so draw the cross accordingly and check knotwork marks in context. 'Celtic' and 'Irish' are not exclusive labels for Kells-type ornament: Insular art was made across Britain and Ireland, the Lindisfarne Gospels in Northumbria, and Kells itself possibly begun on Iona. George Bain died in 1968, so his drawings remain in copyright in the UK until the end of 2038: construct new knots by his methods rather than tracing his plates, and have any Irish or Scottish Gaelic text checked by a fluent reader.

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.

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