Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06797_Field_TCUM T362.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 929b | 16 lines

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. . . .”