Some miles further northward lie Deventer and
Zwolle and Kempen, the land of the Brothers of the Pen, and of the
immortal Thomas ? Kempis. There is a style of calligraphic ornament
deriving its origin from these Northern Hollandish foundations such as
Zwolle, which is confined almost entirely to the painting of the initial
letters and the decorating of the borders with flourished scrolls of
penwork very neatly drawn and terminating in equally neat but extremely
fanciful flowers finely painted. It seems to have been brought at some
time from the neighbourhood of Milan, where a similar kind of initial
and exceedingly neat penmanship also is found in the choir books. Many
South German choir books are similarly ornamented, so that it is not
easy to say at once where the work was done. The Dutch illuminators,
however, may usually be recognised by the Netherlandish character of the
miniatures combined with neat and sometimes rigidly careful penmanship
in the scrolls and tendrils and a hardness in the outline of the
flowers. Sometimes the large initials are entirely produced by the pen,
the labyrinthine patterns in blue or vermilion being filled in with
circlets, loops, and other designs with infinite patience and excellent
effect. Some of the border scrolls are exceedingly pretty, and the
borders differ from Flemish in mixing natural flowers painted in thin
water-colours with the more conventional flowers painted with a
different medium, not in the later Flemish manner where the flowers are
frankly direct imitations of nature, and painted in the same medium as
the rest of the illumination.
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