Citation/reference: Kup article. Dictionary catalog. Library dossier. Listed in Digital Scriptorium, University of California, Berkeley.
Content: Most pages have two quarters devoted to pictures and two to text (4 to about 20 lines). A few pages are full text. No visible ruling.
Content: 408 colored drawings of plants, trees, food, animals, and activities.
Content: Red and blue initials with opposing-color decoration. Placemarkers.
Date: Dated to ca. 1475 by notes in dossier; in a northern Italian dialect. Acc. to Kup, the direct ancestor of the illustration cycle in our ms. is the Latin Tacuinum Vienna ONB 2644 (from ca. 1385 for the Cerruti family; facsimile in bibliography).
Content: Compiled in Arabic by Ibn Butlan, late 11th c., deriving from Dioscorides. A Tacuinum ms. in Vienna with ownership note from 1472, very like this ms., is ascribed to Cadamosto (as translator?). Here, table of contents, ff. 1-2v.
Biographical/historical: Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts are vehicles of the collective memory of western European culture, and provide a material connection between the scribes, illuminators, and patrons who produced these works and the audiences who view them today. The works represent diverse genres, from Bibles and missals to romance literature and science texts. Dating from the turn of the 10th century until well into the period of the Renaissance, these works give vivid testimony to the creative impulses of the often nameless craftsmen who continually discovered new ways of animating the contents of hand-produced books through inventive and sometimes exuberant manipulations of all the elements of the book: form and format, layout, script, decoration, illustration, and binding. Drawn from the Spencer Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library’s collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts focus on the 9th through the 16th centuries -- seven hundred years of political, ecclesiastical, social, and intellectual change in Western Europe and the world.
Physical Description
Extent: 109 leaves, bound : paper, ink, manuscript, illuminations ; 393 x 281 mm
