Illuminated manuscripts date back long before the printing press, and their manufacture was arduous.
Literacy itself was rare in the Dark Ages and usually only the province of educated nobility and the professionally religious. Most people had no hope of learning to read, so the monks charged with copying religious texts were already practitioners of a rare skill for their time.
They weren’t just writing either. They carefully illustrated each page with drawings, cartouches and other decorative touches, and the text itself was a form of art in its calligraphic symmetry, designed to be beautiful as well as legible.
It took thousands of hours to complete a manuscript. There was no whiteout and no do-overs: a mistake meant the page had to be scrapped even if it represented a week’s worth of work.
So when a Flemish scribe finished a page of his manuscript and set it aside, he thought he was in the clear — until a cat came along and left its own signature in the form of paw prints.
Three of them, in fact, representing one and a half kitty strides. Two of the feline’s little feet found white space, but another landed right on top of the meticulously rendered text.
It kind of puts keyboard cats in context, doesn’t it? Our four legged friends may occasionally ruin our drafts or emails — or in my case wreck a music recording session with a discordant keyboard solo by walking across a synthesizer at an inopportune time — but at least they don’t cost us dozens of hours of work.
The 500-year-old, kitty-marked manuscript is now the centerpiece of “Paws On Parchment,” a new exhibit at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.
Click here for more details from the museum, which is open Tuesday through Saturday, with late hours on Thursday evenings. Admission is free.
And if you ever take up calligraphy as a hobby, keep your work hidden from your feline overlords!
Pain In The Bud 