historiated

English

Adjective

historiated (comparative more historiated, superlative most historiated)

1. Adorned with decorative pictures that tell a story.
   • 1994 March, R Ousterhout, “Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, an Annotated Bibliography and Historiography by W. Eugene Kleinbauer”, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, volume 53, number 1:

     It is difficult to imagine that Bernard of Clairvaux was gullible enough to accept dozens of historiated windows, grisaille fields of griffins, mosaic pavements, carved acanthus capitals, inhabited vine columns, and golden altarware on the strength of the justifications offered by a single window, one tympanum, and Suger's libelli

   • 1996, Ian Atherton, Norwich Cathedral: Church, City, and Diocese, 1096-1996, page 363:

     In Norwich Cathedral there are over 1000 stone roof bosses. Of these about 700 are historiated, that is they either tell a story in themselves or are part of a story told in a sequence of bosses.

   • 2011, Ian Levy, Gary Macy, Kristen Van Ausdall, A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, page 251:

     The linkage of northern and southern Christian concerns is evident in the oldest surviving great golden and gemmed altar frontal with historiated narratives in Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, commissioned between 824 and 859 in an area fairly recently absorbed into Carolingian control (Fig. 28).

   • 2015, Carlos Andrés González-Paz, Women and Pilgrimage in Medieval Galicia, page 145:

     The splendid pictorial collection of nearly two thousand miniatures illuminating the historiated codices of the Cantigas de Santa Maria provides the most reliable evidence for the study of Castilian society in the second half othe thirteenth century.

Usage notes

This is most often used to refer to decorative designs on initial letters that depict parts of the following text.