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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 Prayer Book pairs a unique selection of texts with an extensive cycle of printed images, demonstrating an alternative to the Book of Hours in a period of religious foment. It contains popular devotional works by Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), Marco Girolamo Vida (ca. 1485–1566), and Prudentius (ca. 348–413), copied by hand from printed sources. Within the first half of the book are also sections from the Christiad, an epic poem published in 1535, first written by Marco Girolamo Vida, a humanist bishop, at the request of Leo X, which provides a Christian counterpart to Virgil’s Aeneid. It also features works by the early Christian poet Prudentius, such as hymns, which were appreciated by Erasmian humanists for their conflation of classical Latin forms with Christian motifs. This manuscript demonstrates how readers adapted modern and ancient devotional texts, replacing the traditional Book of Hours.

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.

This copy of Saint Augustine’s City of God is an example of the involvement of traditional illuminators with the new technology of printing. This third edition copy was printed in Italy by the German printers Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz. The two business partners were the first to establish a press outside of German-speaking lands, and by 1467, they had moved in search of greater economic opportunities to Rome, where the present volume was printed. Adapting to their translapine audience, Sweynheym and Pannartz abandoned the Gothic typeface used in Northern Europe, developing a semi-Roman type, followed by a fully Roman version, upon their move to the papal city. Most remarkably, this incunable’s secondary decoration was added not in Italy, but in France. The figures in the illuminated initials in particular are attributed to the workshop of François Le Barbier in the later part of the fifteenth century.

In the incunable period, it was common practice for a small number of copies of a single edition to be printed on parchment, rather than on paper. These could be specially commissioned by discerning bibliophiles, offered to prized patrons by booksellers, or given to the sponsors of that particular print run. This copy of Cicero’s Orations, printed in Venice in 1471, is an example of just such a phenomenon. Its opening page has been transformed into an elaborate architectural frontispiece by the Veneto-Paduan illuminator Giovanni Vendramin (act. 1466–ca. 1509), a prolific artist who embellished numerous other incunables in the 1470s, as well as the occasional manuscript. This incunable edition contains twenty-eight of Cicero’s Orations, edited by Ludovico Carbone (ca. 1430–85), a humanist orator in the service of the d’Este court in Ferrara.

These splendid initials, which form part of a larger set of cuttings held at the Free Library, demonstrate the creativity and delicacy that could be applied to aspects of book illustration sometimes considered secondary to larger narrative miniatures. The Milanese artist to whom these can be attributed, the so-called Master B.F. (act. ca. 1490–1545) is so named after a number of works he signed with these initials, including an historiated initial of King David, also at the Free Library. The three historiated initials in Philadelphia, these sets of initials, and several more decorated letters, all in the Free Library, were associated with numerous other fragments from a dismembered set of twenty choir books from the Olivetan monastery of Santi Angelo e Niccolò at Villanova Sillaro, near Lodi.

This little-known Book of Hours features inventive, elaborate miniatures, which are typical of work made in Lyon in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Each large miniature is surrounded by a distinct, two-level all’antica architectural frame that adapts the vocabulary of Veneto-Paduan illumination to the traditional layout of French-made Books of Hours. This book contains thirteen large miniatures in addition to twenty smaller inset miniatures and twenty-four calendar vignettes of the Zodiac and labors of the months. The artist responsible for these miniatures is identifiable as the Master of the Entry of Francis I (fl. ca. 1493–1517), the anonymous illuminator so named after a manuscript containing fascinating illustrations of temporary “tableaux vivants” set up by the citizens of Lyon throughout the city to greet the French King in July 1515. The artist was active in the city of Lyon from about 1485 to 1515.

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.

This detached manuscript leaf introduced the hour of Prime for the Hours of the Virgin in a Book of Hours produced in France in the second decade of the sixteenth century. This miniature of the Presentation in the Temple is attributed to a close associate of the Master of the Parisian Entries, an artist potentially identifiable through an inscription in another one of his works as Jean Coene IV (act. ca. 1490–1520). The busy, asymmetrical columns, playful putti, and hanging garlands are typical of the French adaptation of all’antica ornament, which resembles that of contemporary Veneto-Paduan frontispieces.

This Book of Hours is unusual in several ways. Its text is written in gold leaf and lapis lazuli only. Chrysography, or writing in gold, is extremely rare and marked of the superlative status of the patron. The text was completed around 1425, either in France or by a French-trained scribe. The book’s sixteen miniatures date from the end of the fifteenth century and are by two distinct artists that were trained north and south of the Alps. Cristoforo Majorana (act. ca. 1472–94), an illuminator for the Aragonese court in Naples, painted twelve of the miniatures. The other four miniatures are from the workshop of the Master of the della Rovere Missals (act. ca. 1467–1506?), a prolific painter alternately active in France and Rome from the 1460s to 1506. This manuscript constitutes a hybrid object that speaks of the intense cultural exchanges that took place between Italy and the North.