Bells would also ring as water moved from one level to the next to create a pleasant tinkling; providing lighthearted visual entertainment are drolleries, rendered in base taille enamel.
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Often they have a thematic connection with the subject of the text of the page, and larger miniatures, and they usually form part of a wider scheme of decorated margins, though some are effectively doodles added later. One manuscript, The Croy Hours, has so many it has become known as The Book of Drolleries. Another manuscript that contains many drolleries is the English Luttrell Psalter, which has hybrid creatures and other monsters on a great deal of the pages. This comes from the East Anglian school of illumination, which was especially fond of adding drolleries.
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Artists began to give the tiny faces of the figures in grotesque decorations strange caricatured expressions, in a direct continuation of the medieval traditions of the drolleries in the border decorations or initials in illuminated manuscripts. From this the term began to be applied to larger caricatures, such as those of Leonardo da Vinci, and the modern sense began to develop. It is first recorded in English in 1646 from Sir Thomas Browne:"In nature there are no grotesques".OED, "Grotesque" By extension backwards in time, the term became also used for the medieval originals, and in modern terminology medieval drolleries, half-human thumbnail vignettes drawn in the margins, and carved figures on buildings (that are not also waterspouts, and so gargoyles) are also called "grotesques".
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Joe Wilson was probably the most prolific of all the Geordie songwriters of the time. He performed his own works in the various halls of entertainment around the region until he became too ill. Many of his songs were published in his book Songs and Drolleries, and also in Allan's Tyneside Songs and Readings.
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Joe Wilson was probably the most prolific of all the Geordie songwriters of the time. Many of his works were published in his book of ‘Songs and Drolleries’ which is a feast of dialect materials. This version is as follows:- Come, Geordie—ha'd the Bairn or Aw wish thy Muther wad cum. Air – “"The Whistling Thief".” Come, Geordie, ha'd the bairn, Aw's sure aw'll not stop lang; Aw'd tyek the jewel me sel, But really aw's not strang.
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In 1856 he wrote Plu-Ri-Bus-Tah, a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha. As a correspondent for the New York Tribune he wrote a report on the Pierce Butler slave sale in Savannah, Georgia in 1859 that was subsequently published as a tract by the American Anti-slavery Society and translated into several languages. Thomson died in New York City on June 25, 1875. In 1888, when his short piece, "A New Patent Medicine Operation", was anthologized in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, an introductory paragraph described Thomson as a figure whose "dashing and extravagant drolleries" had quickly passed from fashion.
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Joe Wilson was probably the most prolific of the Geordie songwriters of the time. Many of his works were published in his book of Songs and Drolleries. This version is as follows: KEEP YOUR FEET STILL, GEORDIE HINNY Air (or Teun) – “My Darling Nellie Grey” Wor Geordey an' Bob Jonsin byeth lay i' one bed, Iv a little lodgjin hoose that's doon the shore, Before Bob had been an' oor asleep, a kick frae Geordey's fut Myed him wakin up to roar instead o' snore. KORUS Keep yor feet still! Geordey, hinny, let's be happy for the neet, For aw maynt be se happy throo the day.
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Marginalia: a fox carries a goose Marginalia in Gorleston Psalter The Gorleston Psalter is richly illustrated, with frequent illuminations, as well as many bas-de-page (bottom-of-the-page) illustrations or drolleries as marginalia. The bulk of the manuscript is taken up by the psalms (foll. 8r–190v), which is preceded by a calendar (1r–6v, with twelve roundels) and a prayer (7v), and followed by a canticles (190v–206r), an Athanasian creed (206r–208v), a litany (208v–214r), collects (214r–214v), an Office of the Dead (223v–225v), prayers (223v–225v), a hymn (225v–226r), and a litany (226r–228r). The prayer on fol.
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The margins of many pages are heavily decorated with abstract designs that constantly sprout into plant shapes, and contain many small "marginal grotesques" of no obvious religious relevance. skate terrorises a man; one of many bizarre marginalia features throughout the Psalter. The Psalter, (noted for its gaudy, vivid images and its coarse Pythonesque humour) abounds in images of grotesques and drolleries. These images include grotesques with faces on their bottoms, three-headed monsters with hairy noses, a dog in a bishop's costume, an ape doctor giving a false diagnosis to a bear patient, rabbits jousting and riding hounds and a giant skate terrorising a man.
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Page from the 14th-century Luttrell Psalter, showing drolleries on the right margin and a ploughman at the bottom Piers Plowman (written 1370-90) or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman (William's Vision of Piers Plowman) is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in unrhymed, alliterative verse divided into sections called passus (Latin for "step"). Like the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, even preceding and influencing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Piers Plowman contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales.
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The book cover art is a photograph which parodies a series of 1970s TV commercials advertising a blue toilet bowl cleanser in which a tiny man (known as the Ty-D-Bol man), wearing a neat nautical outfit and a yachting cap, was seen motoring around the inside of a toilet cistern in a tiny boat, always by himself. On the book cover parody, the Ty-D-Bol man is playing the ukulele and has a beautiful female companion in a bikini, however, the cistern is about to be flushed. The Ty-D-Bol man was played by Ed Subitzky. A description (or possibly a subtitle) on the cover reads: > Being a Miscellany of Divers Ribald Drolleries Culled from the Pages of the > National Lampoon, to which are appended Sundry Amusing Sketches by Mr. Sam > Gross, Esq.
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Only towards the end of the decade did he switch to make painting his main medium, and all his famous paintings come from the following period of little more than a decade before his early death, when he was probably in his early forties, and at the height of his powers. As well as looking forwards, his art reinvigorates medieval subjects such as marginal drolleries of ordinary life in illuminated manuscripts, and the calendar scenes of agricultural labours set in landscape backgrounds, and puts these on a much larger scale than before, and in the expensive medium of oil painting. He does the same with the fantastic and anarchic world developed in Renaissance prints and book illustrations.Gombrich, 295; Clark, 41–43, 27, 33, 57, also covering Gothic aspects of Bruegel's style He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Bruegel", to distinguish him from the many later painters in his family, including his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638).
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Rothschild Prayerbook, two-page opening It contains the work of several leading miniaturists of the final flowering of the Ghent-Bruges school of Flemish illumination, who also co-operated on the Grimani Breviary, the Spinola Hours (Malibu) and other major manuscripts of these years. Most of the sixty-seven large miniatures are by the "Master of the First Prayerbook of Maximilian", an older artist, and Gerard Horenbout or the Master of James IV of Scotland (these being two names probably for the same artist).Kren & McKendrick prefer to use Master of James IV of Scotland, accepting he was very likely Horenbout Other miniatures are by Gerard David, better known as a panel painter, or a pupil working in his style, with two miniatures by Simon Bening, and other work by further masters. There are wide borders, many with flowers and other objects and drolleries, and another group with trompe l'oeil imitations of bronzes.
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