The History of the Kingdom of The West
Scrolls

Layout and Design of Artwork

Photo and Contribution
by Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

"After sketching out the figure for Rose's likeness, difficulty arose with the drape of her garment. The photographs didn't show all of it, and in any event it didn't look right. After much messing about, I appealed to Aldith for assistance. She sat down and drew up the beautiful drapery on the figure in 20 minutes flat. After looking at quite a few illustrations in the Visconti Book of Hours, I drew in the stool. Then ensued a search for pictures of classic Doric columns, to see what their bases looked like -- turns out they don't have bases, they sit directly on the floor. This didn't look quite right so the columns were set upon a single raised step each, going with the style shown on the right. Originally the idea had been to use redwood columns; upon reflection, this would have made the color scheme very difficult, so that was replaced with polished stone pillars.

"Rose had only two requests she wanted to have a reference to a lamb eating a lion, and she wanted her motto included. The lamb eating the lion worked perfectly in the open end of the large letter B in the Visconti Hours, often the open end of a large letter D would have a dragon eating a baby, which was from the family Arms. Various attempts were made at working in a motto scroll by letting it along the large enclosing letter (moving the Arms into disks imbedded in the letter put the kibosh on that plan) or by writing it along a ribbon wrapped around the letter. The scroll ribbon seemed to look stupid no matter what was done, and eventually the motto was moved onto the hem of the seated figure's gown. The Lombardic letters along the bottom of the central panel were sketched in and the layout was complete." -- Tatiana Nikolaevna Tumanova

The West Kingdom History Website was created by and is maintained by Hirsch von Henford (mka Ken Mayer).