Friday, February 3, 2012

Scrolls

"The continuous length of the roll of script, the 'locomotion' implicit in its format, the unrolling of it (which still echoes in the term 'volume' now applied to another referent), raised the possibility of creating laterally open pictorial compositions. The codex, with its sequence of relatively small, separate leaves, requires lateral enclosure of pictorial space, identifying it with the finite space of the page of the book"(Otto Pächt, The Illuminated Book in the Middle Ages, 25-26).