Thank you for posting this. I recently visited the stunning exhibition, "Masterpieces in Miniature: Italian Manuscript Illumination from the J. Paul Getty Museum" in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington. Unfortunately, the show just ended on January 2, 2006. It was well worth the trip. There's a remarkable film in the theatre there showing the enormous resources required to produce these books. What was quite surprising to learn was the money and labour resources required to produce a compact illuninated manuscript often exceeded that of producing a giant ceiling fresco in a church. Consider the parchment itself, before the hundreds of hours of calligraphy and art were added. Being produced from meticulously scraped, ground and powdered sheepskins, an average book required the slaughter of literally hundreds of animals, an extremely costly prospect at the time. But lucky for us, sheepskin, being acid free and exceptionally stable, contributed to the perfect preservation of these often overlooked jewels of the Catholic imagination
