Drawings of siege weapons, tactics etc.

Collection History

The New York Public Library possesses one of the largest and finest collections of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts in North America, yet its manuscript holdings are scarcely known to scholars, much less to a wide public audience. 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 Library's Spencer Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives Division, these works focus on the 9th through the 16th centuries -- seven hundred years of profound political, ecclesiastical, social, and intellectual change in Western Europe and the world. Among these rare items are a 10th-century Ottonian manuscript, with its imitation of Byzantine textile with gold decoration; the Towneley Lectionary, illuminated by Giulio Clovio (once praised as the "Michelangelo of small works"), which originated in Rome and probably belonged to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; and a late 15th-century Book of Hours, which represents the leading style of illumination from Besançon, one of the French Regional Schools.

Background

"The Digital Scriptorium" originated in the mid-1990s as an image database, intended to unite scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. NYPL curators have augmented the Digital Scriptorium's primary documentation of NYPL's contribution of 259 manuscript parts with images of the works' most significant illuminations. Some works in this digital presentation also appeared in the exhibition, "The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at The New York Public Library," held October 21, 2005 - February 12, 2006 in the Library's D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall.

- Collection History and Background text excerpted from the press release and exhibition catalog descriptions for "The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at The New York Public Library."

Related Resources

Alexander, Jonathan J. G., James H. Marrow, and Lucy Freeman Sandler. The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at The New York Public Library. (2005)

NYPL. "The Splendor of the Word: Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts at The New York Public Library." (2005-2006) <http://www.nypl.org/research/calendar/exhib/hssl/hsslexhibdesc.cfm?id=354>

University of California, Berkeley. "The Digital Scriptorium." (c1996-2004) <http://www.digital-scriptorium.org>

Collection Data

Names
Borsatis (Artist)
Borsatis (Scribe)
Taccola, Mariano, 1381-approximately 1458 (Associated name)
Dates / Origin
Date Created: 1449
Library locations
Spencer Collection
Shelf locator: Spencer Coll. MS. 136
Genres
Manuscripts
Drawings
Notes
Ownership: Collection of Count Wilczek, Austria. Bought for Spencer, 1959.
Content: 2 scribes?: A, ff. a-102v; B, f. 104v
Content: Borsatis from exemplar by Taccola?
Content: Dated to ca. 1449; on f. 102, the scribe (Borsatis) copied the colophon of his exemplar, which is dated 1449. Rose suggests that Borsatis copied this ms. from a Taccola autograph such as Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, MS Latinus 28800.
Citation/reference: Dictionary Catalog. Rose and Beck articles. Library dossier. Listed in Digital Scriptorium, University of California, Berkeley.
Content: Drawings of siege weapons, tactics etc. 2- and 3-line red initials. Red slashes as placemarkers.
Content: Folio numbers in table of contents do not correspond to the folios in this manuscript. Il Taccola was nicknamed the Archimedes of Siena.
Content: Many drawings contain human figures.
Content: Most pages contain drawings and a few lines of commentary. Text pages contain up to 40 long lines per page, ruled in very faded ink.
Content: The ms. is foliated 1-104, missing the first folio (labelled a) and labelling 2 blank folios as 5a and 5b. But ff. 21, 36 and 64 are missing (stubs visible), so the total number remains 104. Foliation in the manuscripts is used for convenience.
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: Ff. 104, 314 x 218 mm.
Paper
Type of Resource
Still image
Text
Identifiers
NYPL catalog ID (B-number): b22864094
Universal Unique Identifier (UUID): 6e00bac0-c61e-012f-878f-58d385a7bc34
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