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Around 1405, Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) translated Basil of Caesarea’s thousand-year-old Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature into Latin. Saint Basil’s careful call for the appreciation of pagan Greek literature by a youthful Christian audience would become increasingly popular in the 1440s as the Council of Ferrara-Florence brought Greek intellectuals to Italy in droves. Saint Basil’s pithy, ten-chapter tract begins with a justification for the offering of advice for adolescents, originally intended for members of his family. The author then gradually introduces the reader to the reasons why the reading of profane literature might be profitable for the soul. The manuscript can be dated precisely to 19 November 1442; a colophon names the scribe as a certain “Franciscus Tuisanus.” From an early date, the book was owned by members of the Martinotius (Martinozzi) family of Fano, on the Adriatic coast.

This manuscript textbook on practical arithmetic intended for a merchant’s adolescent son or daughter, with common mathematical problems accompanied by vivid illustrations is an apparently unique and possibly autograph text, produced in Nola, east of Naples, by Pierpaolo Muscharello in 1478. The contents reflect the curriculum of the Abacus, a form of secondary school frequented by the children of merchants between the ages of about eleven and fifteen. These schools taught the practical skills of mathematics and geometry useful for commercial transactions, together with knowledge of foreign and domestic trading practices. The work begins with several pages of multiplication tables, followed by a table of contents, and a preface including the arms of the Alberti family. Though the decoration mimics that of contemporary Neapolitan illuminators such as Cola Rapicano (act. 1451–d. 1488) and Cristoforo Majorana (act. ca. 1472–94), the illumination undoubtedly the work of a nonspecialist.

Guillaume Tardif (ca. 1436–95), born in the central French town of Le Puy-en-Velay, attended the University of Paris in 1456 and became a tutor first to Prince Charles of France (1446–72), and then to the Dauphin, the future Charles VIII (1470–98), who named Tardif his official “lecteur” upon his accession to the throne. Tardif was instrumental in introducing the work of the Italian humanists to the Valois court, translating works by Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and Poggio Bracciolini into French. This is the autograph copy of Tardif’s earliest work, an original textbook on Latin grammar. As such, it is the earliest humanistic grammatical text written in France. Currently the only known document in Tardif’s hand, it was dedicated and offered to his pupil Charles Mariette, godson of Charles of France, as a New Year’s gift for 1470. The first illuminated initial features the arms of the Mariette family.

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.

This stout volume is a transcription of two of the astronomer Regiomontanus’s later works, based upon their incunable editions. This manuscript contains Regiomontanus’s highly accurate Calendarium, which provides information on lunar and solar eclipses, daylight hours, and the signs of the zodiac and planetary positions for the years 1475 to 1530 and the Ephemerides, which provides positions for the sun, moon, and planets for each day of each year from 1480 to 1506. Regiomontanus set up his own press in Nuremburg in 1475 in order to ensure sufficient quality in the complex lunar diagrams and tables. Each annual section is indicated by a leather or parchment finding tab. The inclusion of the feast of Saint Kilian and its related Octave in the volume’s liturgical calendar is specific to the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach, in Upper Austria on the Traun River south of Linz.

This manuscript consists of an otherwise unknown treatise in thirty-five chapters on the Astrolabe quadrant, a simplified version of the medieval instrument reduced to a quarter circle. The quadrans novus was cheaper and simpler to make, yet could still perform most of an Astrolabe’s functions— namely, the measurement of altitude, latitudes, and longitudes, and the calculation of the time of day and night. The text is illustrated with meticulous diagrams and tables describing the use of the instrument. The binding, which consists of a bifolium from a twelfth-century copy of Augustine’s Commentary on the Gospel of John, is written in rare Beneventan script. A southern Italian localization is bolstered by textual references to the island of Diomedes off the coast of Puglia (now the Isole Tremiti) and by the watermark, which is similar to one employed in Naples later in 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.

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 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.

This paper manuscript is possibly the presentation copy of a treatise on edible fruits dedicated to Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1431–1505). It appears to have been personally transcribed by its author, Baptista Massa of Argenta, and includes a colophon bearing the date of 10 June 1471. Each chapter is devoted to a type of fruit and its effects on parts of the body, such as the complexion, stomach, kidneys, heart, and brain. The names of medical authorities cited in the text, such as Galen, Avicenna, and Isaac Israeli, are written in the margins in red ink, demonstrating the extent to which classical and Arabic sources remained dominant reference points in physiological studies at the time.