Browse Entries (87 items total)

This is a collection of papal decrees and bulls concerning the Augustinian order. The compilation begins with a series of older texts combined into a sprawling bull outlining privileges for friars of the Augustinian order, the Dum fructus uberes. This work was composed at the instigation of Sixtus IV in 1475. The text was commissioned by the Augustinian theologian and abbot Antonio Meli, for the use of Joannis Angeli, both friars in Crema, Lombardy. The manuscript’s borders can be attributed to the workshop of Giovanni Pietro da Cemmo (doc. 1474–1507). This artist was well-known as a fresco painter who enjoyed very close links to the city’s Augustinian convent (today the Museo Civico) in the early sixteenth century, where he painted a refectory fresco cycle in 1507. The portrait in the roundel at the bottom of this folio is that of Saint Augustine.

Like the previous item, this manuscript is an elaborately decorated commissione issued during the dogeship of Leonardo Loredan (1501–17). It was issued to Paolo Nani and designates him as podestà and capitaneus of the important inland town of Treviso. The frontispiece features an elaborate frame of all’antica ornamentation, while the central image shows Saint Paul presenting a kneeling Nani to the enthroned Virgin and Child, a simplified version of large-scale compositions by contemporary Venetian painters. It is likely the work of the illuminator and cartographer Benedetto Bordone (1450–1530). Not only was Bordone a master illuminator of Venetian commissioni in the early the sixteenth century, he also likely designed woodcuts for Francesco Colonna and Aldus Manutius. The vibrant colors of Bordone’s frontispiece bear witness to the high-quality pigments available to artists working in Venice, the European hub for the trade of paintstuffs at the turn of the sixteenth century.

This manuscript is a commissione issued to Andrea Valier by Doge Leonardo Loredan in 1502. The text concerns Valier’s duties and rights as podestà or civil administrator of Piran, an Istrian town in present-day Slovenia that was under Venetian control from 1283 to the extinction of the republic in 1797. This exemplar belongs to a wider genre of Venetian administrative records that came to be transformed into luxurious showpiece copies. This folio features an elaborate architectural frontispiece in the all’antica style, a revival of ancient forms characteristic of humanist book production in Renaissance Italy. The illumination has recently been attributed to the First Pisani Master, so named on account of two Aldine editions with Pisani heraldry. During Loredan’s dogeship of Venice (1501–17), the city-state was wracked by conflict with France, the Papal States, and other Italian powers, and yet it also saw some of its most brilliant artistic achievements.

This manuscript features decrees and grants relating to the jurist Giovanni Faella of Verona and his family. The main portion begins with copies of grants and titles relating to the Faella family and their castle at Sona, near Verona, the originals of which ranged in date from 1332 to 1406. There follows the text of a charter from Emperor Frederick III (1415–93), issued at Padua in 1468, conferring on Faella, his brothers, and their descendants the titles of Counts of Sona and Counts Palatine, and granting the title of doctor of canon and civil law to Giovanni. The final, later section includes two letters from the Emperor Maximilian I instructing Giovanni Faella to proceed to Mantua to accompany the bishop of Gurk on his embassy to Pope Julius II, 1511, and a copy of a lengthy contract of purchase of land by Giovanni di Jacopo Faella in 1440.

This ascetic miscellany contains a selection of works related to self-privation, and yet, its first page is decorated with vibrant white-vine motifs fashionable in central Italy around 1470. Five texts are included in the miscellany, beginning with the anonymous tract on the art of dying well, De arte bene moriendi, followed by an excerpt from the legend of Saint Bernard by Jacobus da Voragine. The manuscript’s longest text, the De miseria humane conditionis, was authored by Lothar of Segni (1160 or 1161–1216), who would reign from 1198 as Pope Innocent III. His text was extremely popular in the later centuries of the Middle Ages and survives in over 700 other copies. The other texts in this miscellany consist of a rhyming poem on the fifteen signs of doomsday extracted from Jacobus da Voragine’s writings and a dialogue between the body and the soul attributed to Saint Bernard.

This manuscript is a twelfth-century copy of the Sententiae of Saint Isidore (ca. 560–636). As bishop of Seville, Isidore was instrumental in converting the Visigothic kings to Christianity, but he is most famous for his encyclopedic summa of universal knowledge, the Etymologies, which has led him to be called “the last scholar of the ancient world.” The Sentences, though less influential than the Etymologies, consist of a collection of theological writings meant to serve as a manual for the clergy and were gleaned from the works of Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine. The work is divided into three parts and covers subjects such as creation, the nature of evil, ecclesiastical orders, and the judgment of God. Though this manuscript was produced in the Iberian Peninsula, the interlaced initial S depicted here resembles initials produced by Florentine scribes and illuminators in the fifteenth century.

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.

Arezzo-born historian and statesman Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) is credited with instigating the tripartite vision of history made up of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. His synthetic work on the First Punic War (264–41 BC), completed in 1420, became wildly popular. Some 160 manuscripts preserve the original text, with many in the early Italian translation. This copy of Bruni’s text was written in 1444 by the Milanese scribe Milano Borro (act. ca. 1430–50), one of the first practitioners of the littera antiqua in Milan. The true recipient of this copy of Bruni’s text was Gian Matteo Bottigella, secretary to Filippo Maria and later secret councillor to his successor, Gian Galeazzo Sforza. The escutcheon bearing his arms in the lower margin has been obliterated, but the crowned, gilded initials of his double-barreled first name are visible above it.

Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945–1003) was the first Frenchman elected to the papacy and reigned as Sylvester II for the final four years of his life. His renown, however, stems from his prowess as a mathematician and pedagogue. Among his achievements were the reintroduction of the abacus and armillary sphere to Western Europe, via the Islamic civilization of Al-Andalus. He is also thought to be responsible for introducing the Hindu-Arabic numeration system to the Latinate world. This volume contains texts such as Gerbert’s correspondence with Adebaldus of Utrecht on the isosceles triangle, and a short treatise on the astrolabe, another instrument that he helped familiarize to Christian audiences. This manuscript is an excellent example of Renaissance engagement with scholarship from the High Middle Ages. An assiduous reader of classical authors, including Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius, Gerbert of Aurillac was an outstanding conduit of classical thought for much later readers.