"Los Angeles Pop Art uses a technique of art known as Micrography to create its images. Equally as unique as the artwork itself - is the amazing story of where it comes from and how it has been used over the years. Los Angeles Pop Art is proud to be the first and only company creating and adapting this style of art to the Pop Art environment."
Micrography, the scribal practice of employing minuscule script to create abstract shapes or figurative designs, is an art form that has been used by Jews for over a millennium. This intricate decorative technique was first practiced in Egypt and the Land of Israel in the tenth century. Micrography developed within the Islamic cultural milieu in which the written word was frequently transformed into elaborate decorative patterns. This abstract ornamentation, emphasized in Islamic art, strongly influenced the artistic creations of the Jews living in many Near Eastern countries.
Much of the earliest micrography we have is found in biblical codices. Unlike Torah scrolls, these Bibles in book form were not subject to the stringent rabbinical rules that stipulated the arrangement of the text and the design of the letters. Without the prohibition against ornamentation, which applied only to Torah scrolls, these books offered the scribe considerable latitude in arranging and decorating the text.
The most common text employed by scribes to create their micrographic artistry was the masorah. Originally, the masorah (a system of notations that ensure the correct transmission of the writing and reading of the Hebrew Bible) was copied into the margins of biblical codices. Later, scribes began to fashion these masoretic notations into floral motifs and intricate geometric designs. The production of a decorated codex could involve more than one artisan. A sofer (scribe) wrote out the biblical text, a nakdan (vocalizer) was responsible for inserting vowels, accents and cantillation, and a masran (masorator) specialized in copying the masorah into biblical codices. In some instances, however, these tasks were all performed by a single scribe.
By the early thirteenth century, micrography appeared in Europe in the Sephardic manuscripts of Spain and Portugal as well as in the Ashkenazic works produced in Northern Europe. Micrographic ornamentation in the Hebrew books written in the Iberian Peninsula usually consisted of elaborate carpet pages placed at the beginning and ending of the manuscript and at the main divisions of the biblical text. In addition, these texts also featured decorative designs in the margins. The micrographic creations that bordered the text evolved from primarily geometric forms into figural and illustrative representations. Common motifs included the tabernacle implements, human figures and animals.
Bibles produced in France and Germany featured elaborate ornamental panels that introduce the individual biblical books. In addition to geometric designs, these opening panels of Ashkenazic Bibles often displayed a menagerie of micrographic animals, grotesques, fantastic beasts and hunting scenes.
While micrographic art can be found in many manuscripts of the Middle Ages, there were nevertheless instances of rabbinic objections regarding the transformation of the masorah into decorative patterns. Criticism was voiced by the renowned rabbi Judah he-Hasid (ca.1150-1217), who complained that the designs render the masoretic text unusable. He stipulated that a patron commissioning a scribe to copy a Bible, must instruct the scribe not to shape the masorah into any ornamental patterns.
Even after the decline of manuscript production in the sixteenth century, micrography continued to be used to decorate ketubbot (marriage contracts) and wall hangings. From the seventeenth century onward, scribes who practiced the art of micrography favored the texts of the five Megillot, Psalms and Proverbs as the basis of their art.
In 1798, the invention of lithography extended the micrographic arts beyond the exclusive realm of one-of-a-kind manuscripts. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of micrographic prints allowed this ancient art form to reach a much broader Jewish audience. These prints encompassed a wide variety of themes; biblical portraits and vignettes as well as panoramas of the holy sites of Israel were especially popular. Famous rabbinic, political and literary personalities such as Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady, Theodor Herzl and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, were also favored subjects; their micrographic portraits were exactingly rendered from the minute words and letters of their own books and poems.
It is appropriate that a culture that has long emphasized the significance of the Hebrew word would foster a distinctive transformation of script into a unique decorative art. To this day, the art of Hebrew micrography is still practiced and the metamorphosis of text into image remains an unbroken Jewish artistic tradition across the centuries.
Source: http://www.lapopart.com/micrography.asp
