Browse Entries (87 items total)

This historiated initial D showing the Baptism of Christ comes from the same set of Lombard choir books as the previous item, the initial C with Saint John on Patmos, as well as the decorated initial cuttings from the Santi Angelo e Niccolò at Villanova Sillaro choir books. Visually, the composition has some faint echoes of the Baptism of Christ by Andrea del Verrocchio, a painting to which the young Leonardo da Vinci contributed around 1475. Working a generation later in Milan, the artist to whom this image is attributed, Master B.F. (act. ca. 1490–1545), may well have had interactions with Leonardo. Frequent borrowings have been noted from Leonardesque compositions in other cuttings from the Villanova Sillaro choir books. The initial D begins the Collect for the feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June, “D[eus qui praesentem diem honorabilem nobis in beati Joannis . . .].”

This brightly illuminated initial T begins the first words of the Canon of the Mass, “Te igitur, clementissme Pater,” marking the start of the Canon of the Mass. This miniature shows the Lamentation, with Mary holding Christ’s dead body at the center. The miniature’s bright style encapsulates the Florentine High Renaissance aesthetic and can be attributed to Vante di Gabriello di Vante Attavante (1452–ca. 1520/25). Praised by Giorgio Vasari, he garnered significant renown in his own lifetime and was among the experts called upon by the Florentine republic to decide on the appropriate location of Michelangelo’s David. There are over a thousand illuminated manuscripts related to his artistic style. This cutting may be a hitherto unrecognized fragment of a set of three Missals decorated by Attavante around 1520 for the Sistine Chapel by Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as Pope Leo X (r. 1513–21).

This miscellany contains the Historia romana, a reworking by Paul the Deacon (ca. 720–99) of the classic Breviarium ab urbe condita written by Eutropius (fl. ca. 360 AD), which itself drew heavily from classical Roman authors. The next section contains excerpts of speeches that purport to be by the Greek orators Aeschines, Demades, and Demosthenes, translated into Latin. In reality, these consist of fifteenth-century satirical forgeries, usually attributed to Pietro Marcello. Finally, two short exhortative epistles on the value of studying ancient texts, Leonardo Bruni’s letter of 1424 to the poetess Battista Malatesta (De studiis et litteris), and Basil of Caesarea’s De legendis libris gentilium, originally written in Greek in the fourth century, but newly translated into Latin by Bruni, are included. Bruni’s missive is noted for its insistence that women as well as men were suited to reading a classical cursus.

Beginning in the 1480s, Parisian printers, working in close quarters booksellers began to produce Books of Hours for the open market. To create the miniatures of such books, artists initially trained as painters and illuminators provided designs for metalcuts, which combined the surface printing of the woodcut technique with the durability of a copper printing plate. The present edition was issued by Gilles Hardouyn, who, along with his brother Germain, formed a printing business that was active in Paris for a half century, from 1491 to 1541 and dominated the market for mass-produced Books of Hours. The major illuminator and artist responsible for the metalcut images in this book, Jean Pichore, produced twelve sets of metalcuts for Parisian printers between 1504 and 1514. These images, which frequently draw from works by Dürer and other engravers, continued to be employed for several decades.

This printed collection of letters by the Florentine philologist and poet Agnolo Ambrogini, known as Poliziano (1454–94), has been supplemented with hand-copied writings by him and his friends. This multipart book or sammelband was assembled in Germany, demonstrating the far reach of the humanist epistolary style in Northern Europe. The printed text of the first half of the volume was published in Antwerp in 1514 by Dirk Martens, the Flemish editor of Erasmus and Thomas More. It consists of Poliziano’s exemplary Latin letters to humanist prelates and leaders, including the Florentine rulers Lorenzo and Piero de’ Medici, the philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, the printer Aldus Manutius, and Pope Innocent VIII. Following the printed text are manuscript versions of seventeen letters sent to Poliziano or exchanged among his friends. The manuscript section also includes two orations by Poliziano.

The extreme delicacy, brilliant palette, and crystalline naturalism of these three excised fragments are hallmarks of Girolamo di Giovanni dei Corradi da Cremona (doc. 1460–83), one of the foremost illuminators of manuscripts and printed books in Italy during the third quarter of the fifteenth century. It has been suggested that this cutting might be the remnants of a Missal produced by Girolamo for Lucrezia de’ Medici (1448–93), second daughter of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni. The historiated initial showing the Elevation of the Host is from the Canon of the Mass. The roundel, showing a pair of deer in a similar landscape, comes from the lower portion of a border facing the beginning of the Missal’s prefaces, as indicated by the decorated prephatio catchword on the reverse side.

The Austrian astronomer Georg von Peuerbach (1423–61) served as an influential mentor to Regiomontanus and an advisor to such highly placed individuals as cardinal Basilios Bessarion and the polymath theologian Nicholas of Cusa. He was appointed court astrologer to the teenage King Ladislaus V of Hungary and later to his uncle, Emperor Frederick III. Around 1454, Peuerbach composed the Novae theoricae planetarum, which was published posthumously in Nuremberg in 1473. This dependable astronomy manual became the standard reference work on the subject for over 150 years. This volume contains seventy-three full-page diagrams, one double-page diagram, and four half-page diagrams. It is likely that these moveable diagrams originated as teaching aids devised by Peuerbach himself, a skilled instrument maker, in the fifteenth century. He later wrote a treatise entitled Speculum planetarum on the construction of paper manuscript volvelles to demonstrate planetary motions as described in the Novae theoricae planetarum.

This initial comes from the choir books from the Olivetan monastery of Santi Angelo e Niccolò at Villanova Sillaro, outside of Lodi. The series of twenty choir books commissioned by that community was a major financial, logistical, and artistic enterprise and was repeated often in Italy and elsewhere, beginning in the thirteenth century, providing a ready clientele for ambitious illuminators like Master B.F. (act. ca. 1490–1545). Necessary for full liturgical celebrations, these choir books were produced prior to the completion of altarpieces, frescoes, and other para-liturgical furnishings.

This large, decorated initial B is a fragment cut from the beginning of a twelfth-century copy of Cassiodorus’s book on the Psalms, the Expositio psalmorum. Text on the reverse side of the cutting is identifiable as the preface of Cassiodorus’s work. Here, the large letter B begins the short excerpt from Psalm 1, “Beatus vir..”

This initial has been excised from an eleventh-century copy of Florus of Lyon’s commentary on the Epistles of Paul: the fragmentary text visible on the reverse side includes the conclusion of the commentary on Philemon and the beginning of the section on Hebrews. Florus (ca. 810–60) was a theologian, canonist, and liturgist educated in the spirit of the Carolingian Renaissance. His work on the Pauline Epistles was widely copied in the following centuries. The white-vine scroll decoration seen in this fragment—known in Italian as bianchi girari—is typical of manuscript illumination associated with the Romanesque period. It was later borrowed by humanist scribes and illuminators who thought the texts they were copying were ancient, or at least reliable copies of lost originals.