3. Crafting the Codex; All’antica: Between Ornament and Display
9 items in collection

While scribes and decorators worked to revive scripts and vegetal ornament found in Carolingian and Romanesque manuscripts they mistakenly considered to be far older, new decorative vocabularies began to emerge based on true classical forms. Beginning in the 1450s, artists in Venice, Padua, and the surrounding territories took a particular interest in the visible remains of antiquity, and especially in the epigraphic inscriptions chiseled into venerable stone monuments. The desire to replicate such formal lettering on paper or parchment resulted in the sumptuous faceted initials known as littera mantiniana, after their supposed inventor, the painter Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506). The features of Roman triumphal arches, which were still standing in cities like Verona, Rimini, and Rome itself, were adapted to make for a monumental “entry” into the content of a text: a frontispiece. Classical architectural forms were enlivened with satyrs, frolicking putti, and ornamental garlands found in Roman relief sculpture to form complete scenes enclosing the prewritten or preprinted text in an ingenious way. These elements produced a style known as all’antica or “in the ancient manner,” widely appreciated by humanist book collectors for secular and religious texts alike. This flexible language of book decoration eventually became popular across Europe. French illuminators specializing in Books of Hours, for example, learned of the style through travel and collaboration with their Italian counterparts. In the sixteenth century, these imposing forms would be adapted for the title pages of printed books, instantiating a bibliographic convention that would continue for several hundred years.