In this article we reflect on two works pertaining to the modern and contemporary world in which the illuminated manuscript is used to support the registry of the visionary experience: the Illuminated Prophetic Books of William Blake (1757-1827) and The Red Book of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). These authors considered the illuminated manuscript as a more authentic format for the transmission of their visions, since it surpassed the purely aesthetic dimension of art and brought together a synthesis between the matter and spirit of the symbolic thought of the Neoplatonism of the European twelfth century. From this perspective, we investigate the highly spiritual character that Blake and Jung conferred to the artistic creation and the materiality of the book as a reading and writing support, establishing some correspondences with the new conceptions on art elaborated in the context of the European vanguards of the twentieth century.