are.” It applies to many items besides printed matter—to the 
postage stamp and to the early forms of radio receiving sets.

     Medieval and Renaissance man experienced little of the 
separation and specialty among the arts that developed later. 
The manuscript and the earlier printed books were read aloud, 
and poetry was sung or intoned. Oratory, music, literature, and 
drawing were closely related. Above all, the world of the 
illuminated manuscript was one in which lettering itself was 
given plastic stress to an almost sculptural degree. In a study 
of the art of Andrea Mantegna, the illuminator of manuscripts, 
Millard Meiss mentions that, amidst the flowery and leafy 
margins of the page, Mantegna’s letters “rise like monuments, 
stony, stable and finely cut. . . . Palpably soled and weighty, 
they stand boldly before the colored ground, upon which they 
often throw a shadow. . . .”