The Sacred Craft

A single decorated initial demanded forty hours of patient brushwork upon stretched vellum, ground, and gesso.

Ground lapis lazuli traveled from Afghan mines to European scriptoria; vermilion came from Iberian cinnabar quarries.

Burnished twenty-three-carat leaf laid over gesso still gleams a thousand winters after its first application.

Drolleries and grotesques dancing in the borders encoded moral lessons only trained monastic eyes could decipher.