Winchester school

Winchester school, painting style of English illuminated manuscripts produced primarily at Winchester but also at Canterbury and in various southern monasteries in the 10th and early 11th centuries. The Winchester style is characterized by boldness, incisiveness, and sumptuous ornament, many of the pages featuring a heavy border enlivened by acanthus designs. The masterwork of Anglo-Saxon art in this period is the Benedictional of St. Aethelwold (10th century; British Museum), in which heavy borders dominate the page designs, creating a low-relief ornamental effect. The colours are rich: purple, green, gold, and blue. The limitation of the style was that it treated both ornament and figures in the same sumptuous, monumental manner. Ultimately, however, the style was modified by the influence of a contemporary trend in drawing (based on the Utrecht Psalter, c. 830) that featured sketchy, agitated figures. The result was a combination of the active figure style and the grand and graceful Winchester decoration, a synthesis seen in the Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges (c. 1008; Rouen, Fr.).