Miniature (pronounced min-ee-uh-cher, min-ee-choor or min-uh-cher)
(1) A representation or image of something on a small or
reduced scale.
(2) A greatly reduced or abridged form or copy.
(3) A very small painting, especially a portrait, showing
fine detail on ivory or vellum.
(4) The art of executing such a painting.
(5) Historically, an illuminated letter or other
decoration in a manuscript.
(6) In packaged alcoholic drinks, the small (usually 50
ml) bottles of spirits typically used in hotel mini-bars.
(7) Being, on, or represented on a small scale; reduced.
(8) In military dress, small versions of medals and decorations,
worn on certain social occasions.
1580–1590: From the Italian miniatura (miniature painting), from the Medieval Latin miniātūra, the construct being miniāt(us) + -ūra (-ure) (From –u(s) (the suffix forming
passive perfect participles) + -ra (the nominal suffix).
Miniature is a noun, verb & adjective and miniaturization is a noun;
the noun plural is miniatures.
Words undergo shifts in meanings or gain new senses which
operate in parallel for a number of reasons including popular use, technological
change, foreign influences and mistakes.
The modern meaning of “miniature” (a small version of something) arose
because of a misunderstanding by medieval scholars who conflated miniāre (to
paint red, (in illuminating manuscripts)) (from minium (the fiery red pigment used during the Middle Ages to
ornament manuscripts)) with the Latin minimus
(small (and in the strict technical sense used in Latin “not less or little but
least”)). Had the scholars of a few
centuries ago got it right then miniature would have meant “an illuminated text”. Long before there were printing presses, a trained
elite worked as scribes, laboriously writing out by hand the books, scrolls and
other manuscripts which were the preserve of the church, the rich and the
relative few others who were literate. In
the west (things were a little more advanced in the Far East), literally whatever
was printed on some form of parchment was the work of human hands and the slight
variation in the style between one page and the next can be used to work out where
the efforts of one scribe stopped and another began.
Illuminated manuscripts.
The process was to press a pigmented point against the surface
which left the marks forming the letters and this was usually done in black but
to enliven things, some characters or shapes were formed in red, often for titles,
the large initial letters which marked the start of a paragraph (a tradition
which persists to this day although the use of color is now rare) or the decorative
drawings which usually in some way related to the subject of the text. The Latin name for the red pigment (made
either from cinnabar or red lead) was minium,
and the corresponding verb meaning “to color with minium” was miniāre.
For the scholars who created
the basis of the early Italian language, the connection between the decorative
drawings rendered in red with miniare
was so persuasive that miniare came
to mean “to decorate a manuscript with a small drawing”. A noun form of the word (miniatura) referred to the art of illuminating (ie adding
illustrations) and in time this lost any hint of the use of a red pigment; it came
to be applied whatever the color. Because
the “illuminations” (as the illustrations in manuscripts were called) were
small compared with most drawings & paintings, miniatura came to be used to describe any small portrait or
painting and, in the way language picked up figurative forms, eventually to
anything very small. In English, “miniature” in that sense had been adopted by
the late sixteenth century.
The concept of the
miniature is well understood but the use is nuanced. We have for decades lived in the age of miniaturization
(now done at the atomic level) but the term “miniature” really makes sense only
at the human scale. In the military
there are miniatures (which are scaled-down versions of decorations worn at
certain social functions) and in a hotel mini-bar (a few still exist and they
can be tempting if paying the high prices with OPM (other people’s money)) a 50
ml bottle of gin is a miniature, a small-scale rendition of the more familiar 700
or 1125 ml containers. Both those
examples are small versions of something larger but the most obvious instances
of modern miniaturization are in electronics but nobody calls a smaller version
of an integrated circuit a “miniature” even if both are structurally identical,
differing only in scale. So, the essence
of the miniature is not merely that it’s minute, microscopic, diminutive, tiny
or minuscule but that it is recognizably a smaller version of something which
is familiar in a larger form. In English,
words in the vein of “miniature” actually have a tangled history. Although it’s now close to extinct, “minify”
was once a favorite among those too fastidious to tolerate the improper use of “minimize”. Minify (the third-person singular simple
present tense was minifies, the present participle minifying and the simple
past and past participle minified) was a nineteenth century back-formation from
magnify, creating its exact opposite.
There was also minish but all
sources list it as archaic (although the popularity of diminish remains
undiminished).
In art history, the term “miniature” is specifically
applied and not necessarily to all small paintings. In August 1899, a number of artists of the Heidelberg
School staged the 9 by 5 Impression
Exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, the name a reference to most of the 183
works on display being painted on the cedar wood lids of cigar-boxes, all measuring
9 x 5 inches (229 x 127 mm). The choice
of medium was not an artistic device but reflected the impoverished artists’ need
for an alternative to expensive canvas, most of the lids obtained for free from
a tobacconist shop run by a family member.
The works were thus not “miniatures” in the accepted sense of the
artistic tradition, even though they conformed with the structural definition
and one criticism at the time was they resembled the small preliminary sketches
artists would often make before commencing a larger work in the same style;
interesting perhaps to academics and critics but hardly suitable for
exhibition. The size of the lids was
actually not significant and had they been somewhat smaller or larger the art
would have been much the same and the Heidelberg School’s particular impressionist
technique was quite distinct from the broken colour technique of the French and
it became the style of landscape painting that would for decades be the
dominant form in Australia. Controversial
at the time, the 9 x 5s actually sold well, the public reacting more favorably
than the critics, still not ready for the “shocks of the new” which awaited
them in the new century and the surviving 9 x 5s now sell for up to Aus$1
million.
A seventeenth century miniature of the Italian School, oil painting on hard stone with a carved, golden frame (80 x 90 mm (3.14 x 3.54 inches).
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