A miniature painting is a small, finely detailed picture made to be looked at from very close. In Europe the term means above all the portrait miniature, a likeness a few inches high that its owner kept in a locket. In Persia and Mughal India, it keeps an older sense, the paintings made for books and albums.
The best-known English example is Young Man among Roses, painted by Nicholas Hilliard around 1587.
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Hilliard was the leading miniature painter at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. In the picture, a young man in black and white leans against a tree among roses, with a Latin motto above his head.
The oval is tall and narrow, 200 millimeters high, about eight inches, with the frame it has always kept. That is large for a likeness meant to be held in the hand, and nobody knows who the young man was or what the picture was made for.
Its size is a clue that the word miniature did not start out meaning small. It comes from minium, or red lead, the bright red pigment used since ancient times to make red ink, and so to letter and decorate handwritten books.
In Latin, miniare meant to color with that red. Italian gave the verb a new sense, to illuminate a manuscript, that is, to decorate its pages with color and gold, and a picture painted in a book became a miniatura.
The link with smallness came later. Book pictures were usually modest in size, and Latin words such as minor and minutus probably helped the two ideas merge. By the seventeenth century, miniature had come to mean a small picture.
In India, size tells even less. At the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled much of the subcontinent in the sixteenth century, painters illustrated a book of adventures called the Hamzanama.
That manuscript had 1,400 illustrations, each more than two feet tall, larger than a newspaper page. They are still called miniatures, because the older sense, a picture made for a book, never left the word.
From the painted book to the portrait
The English portrait miniature began inside books too…
What You'll Discover
Why Hilliard painted on the backs of playing cards.
What Hilliard said a painter should wear.
The clues that fail to name the young man.
What a locket portrait was given for.
What Akbar's painters made for books and albums.
What finally ended the portrait miniature.