THE ARTE OF LIMNING together with A MORE COMPENDIOUS DISCOURSE CONCERNING YE ART OF LIMNING

This edition has a variety of features aimed to make it useful to the scholar while remaining attractive and available to the layman. First and foremost, it provides two versions of the a complete and exact transcript, as near as typography can provide, of the manuscript with all its idiosyncrasies; facing this a modernized version with spelling and punctuation regularized. By this means the text can be read easily without compromising the accuracy and difficulty of the original. The long introduction explores the history of the 'Treatise,' the biography of its author, the historical and artistic context, and the technique of limning. The extensive notes are keyed-in to the modernized text. Last, but by no means least, Hilliard's paintings are used extensively to provide the visual counterpart to his lively prose.

Nicholas Hilliard (1546-1618), the first major painter whose name we know, painted the minature portraits from which we recognise many of the people of the court of Elizabeth I. His technique 'limning' which utilised water-based pigments, was considered among the highest pictorial arts.