Making a Medieval Manuscript, from Raw Materials to Illuminated Masterpiece

What do a sheepskin, feather, colorful minerals, and wooden boards have in common? Inside a medieval scriptorium, a bustling commercial workshop, they’re all materials that were used to make books. These handwritten and hand-decorated volumes, known as manuscripts, were created throughout Europe and the Mediterranean from about 500 to 1500.

The Making of a Medieval Manuscript, now on view at the Getty Center through March 14, 2027, reveals how raw materials were transformed to create beautifully painted books, from an animal skin stretched on a wooden frame to create parchment, to quill pens cut by scribes, to gold leaf and colorful pigments used by book painters (illuminators), to the finely crafted bindings that transformed loose pages into magnificent volumes.

Organized into four sections––Parchment Making, Writing, Illuminating, and Binding—the exhibition showcases every stage of manuscript production. Alongside some of Getty’s most beautiful medieval manuscripts, you will have a rare opportunity to encounter the tools and materials used to create them.

Parchment Making

The process of bookmaking began with the preparation of parchment, mainly produced from the skins of sheep, goats, or calves.

The process was slow and labor intensive. Fresh skins were soaked in limewater for several days to loosen the hair, then stretched tightly on a wooden frame. Parchment makers carefully scraped away the hair and any remaining flesh before washing the skin and stretching it again. Using the curved blade of a lunar knife, they gradually thinned the hide to the desired thickness before sanding it with pumice and dusting it with a fine powder to create a smooth surface that readily accepted ink and paint.

Even today, traces of the animal and parchment maker’s work remain visible. Tiny dark dots on the page below are the animal’s hair follicles. The striated array of hair follicles in the left corner is the result of uneven scraping of the parchment.

Writing

Once prepared, the parchment was cut into pages and ruled with evenly spaced lines to guide the scribe’s handwriting. In the image below, these carefully drawn lines remain visible in the upper half of the page that was to receive an illuminated image but was left unfinished.

Writing a manuscript demanded extraordinary concentration and dedication. A vivid glimpse into a scribe’s practice can be seen in the Irmengard Codex, an 11th-century manuscript produced at the famous Reichenau scriptorium in Germany. Here, Luke, the author of the eponymous Gospel, is portrayed as a medieval scribe seated before a desk, holding a quill in one hand and a knife in the other. Scribes used quill pens made from feathers of a goose or swan. The knife served multiple purposes: it could be used to sharpen the quill during writing, erase textual mistakes by carefully scraping the parchment, and hold the parchment steady during writing. Above Luke, the winged ox, the saint’s traditional symbol, holds a bound Gospel book, symbolizing the divinely inspired Gospel that Luke is painstakingly writing.

Writing by hand was physically demanding. In the 10th century, the scribe Florentius of Valeránica described the hardships of his profession and urged readers to be gentle with books:

If you want to know how great is the burden of writing: it mists the eyes, it curves the back, it breaks the belly and the ribs, it fills the kidneys with pain, and the body with all kinds of suffering. Therefore, turn the pages slowly, reader, and keep your fingers well away from the pages, for just as a hailstorm ruins the fecundity of the soil, so the sloppy reader destroys both the book and the writing. For as the last port is sweet to the sailor, so the last line to the scribe.

His words remind us that producing a manuscript required not only skill but also remarkable physical endurance and commitment.

The handwriting itself could also be a form of adornment. Look closely at the exuberant decorations in the margins of these pages. These elaborate flourishes (cadels) transform the ascending and descending strokes of letters into playful animals, people, and fantastic hybrid creatures, integrating calligraphy and illumination in a unified visual program.

Illuminating

The art of decorating a manuscript with brilliant pigments and precious metals is known as illumination. Gold, in particular, catches and reflects light, causing the pages to shimmer as they are turned.

Most of the time, the text was written before the painting was done. The illuminator first sketched the design and applied gold leaf by using either a sticky tree gum or a thick ground material mixed with glue, called gesso or bole. Layers of brilliant hues, prepared from colored minerals, plant dyes, and other natural materials, were then carefully added to complete the painted designs.

The unfinished page above offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s working process. The text was already written and gold leaf applied. The design was sketched out with only the first layer of colors added to certain figures and architectural elements.

Here, elegant Arabic calligraphy becomes the artwork. The Qur’an text was written entirely in gold, demonstrating the extraordinary union of writing and decoration.

Because gold leaf was so precious and delicate, some illuminations were even protected by small textile curtains, helping to preserve their brilliance for generations.

Binding

The artistry of a medieval manuscript did not end with illumination. Luxury books were often bound between sturdy wooden boards covered with leather and decorated with metal ornaments, ivory, or precious gemstones. The binding reflected both the value of the manuscript and the status of the person who commissioned it.

This impressive medieval binding features heavy wooden boards covered in leather stamped with a variety of decorative designs. Metal centerpieces, corner pieces, and clasps not only enhanced the book’s appearance but also helped protect it by keeping the parchment leaves flat. An iron hook on the lower edge indicates that the volume was once chained to a library shelf, a measure to protect such valuable books from theft.

It is rare to know the names of medieval bookmakers. Here, however, the Flemish bookbinder Lievin Stuvaert proudly signed his work on the inside of the front cover of this manuscript.

Curious to see the process in action? Watch the medieval bookmaking process below.

The Making of a Medieval Manuscript brings the book production process to life. Whether you are fascinated by art, history, or books or simply enjoy discovering how extraordinary objects were made, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to step inside the medieval bookmaking studio. Visit the Getty Center before March 14, 2027, to explore the materials and techniques behind these remarkable creations and experience the extraordinary dedication, skill, and artistry that brought each manuscript to life.