III.6. Italian Books of Hours

This view has been abandoned thanks to the discovery that books of hours ( libri d'ore, also called ore or ojfizioli) were produced in Italy from as early as the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, together with a wide variety of different prayer books and devotional texts, with which they frequently shared image and textual contents. The Italian examples often lack some of the elements normally necessary to be classified as books of hours, either because they are fragmentary or because there was not a definite standard (for example, Boston, BPL, MS qMed. 131, one of the earliest extant, only comprises the calendar, the Office of the Passion, and the Office of the Dead). 1 The Offices in Italian books of hours usually follow the use of Rome. Other uses are exceedingly rare, in particular local ones (as, for example, the Ambrosian use, in Milan), but also those according to specific orders, such as the Dominican use in the case of cat. no. 228.

The extraordinary variety of Italian devotional books is displayed by an unusual picture book (cat. no. 136), without any text except later captions, but comprising forty-eight full-page scenes from the life of Christ, illuminated at the turn of the fourteenth century in Bologna, an important center of production of late Gothic books of hours and devotional texts, as shown by the interesting Liber de eonflictu vitiorum et virtutum (Treatise on the Vices and Virtues), 2 illuminated with a vast cycle of images which can be assigned to the same artist.

The unique features of all fourteenth-century Italian devotional books indicate that each was designed according to the user’s needs and that, at least in this phase, they were never standardized, in contrast to those produced north of the Alps, which also widely circulated in Italy, in particular in courts closely connected to France, such as Angevin Naples and Visconti Lombardy.

It was, however, only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that significant numbers of books of hours were produced in many Italian cities, in particular Milan, Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna in the north, and Florence, Siena, Rome, and Naples in the center and south. Renaissance books of hours from these centers are therefore those that have survived in the largest numbers, both in public collections and on the market.

During the fifteenth century they frequently continued to be designed according to late Gothic models, both in layout, decoration, and script, as shown by examples from northern Italy (cat. no. 134; Boston, BPL, MS q Med. 158; Cambridge, Houghton Library, MSS Typ 27 and Typ 180), central Italy (cat. no. 133), and the south (cat. no. 228). Late Gothic models deriving from Lombardy are still used in the latter, a book of hours made for the queen of Naples Isabella di Chiaromonte, the wife ofFerrante dAragona and daughter-in-law of Alfonso the Magnanimous, founder of the Aragonese dynasty and library in Naples (cat. no. 228). The success of these motifs is shown by their widespread adoption by other workshops, as in an example illuminated by a less talented follower of the queens artist (Cambridge, Houghton Library, MS Typ 553). 3 In the second half of the century, however, new and distinctly Renaissance patterns were elaborated throughout Italy.

Among the main features of these books, which were often produced as wedding gifts, is the presence of a double coat of arms, with the arms of the bride’s and the groom’s families, as in the Nasi-Salviati Hours (cat. no. 231), 4 illuminated in Florence in 1515 for Guglielmo Nasi and Fiammetta Salviati, the daughter of the prominent Alamanno Salviati, who married another of his daughters, Maria, to the famous Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini. This book has a new and unusual elongated format, evocative of humanistic books with literary contents.

Books of hours were produced in Florence in large quantities throughout the Renaissance. Other examples include the elegant hours later owned by the Aldobrandini (cat. no. 230), written in 1498 by the scribe Sigismondo da Carpi, named Count Palatine for his talents, and illuminated by Boccardino il Vecchio, whose workshop specialized in books of hours. Yet another is a small volume (cat. no. 229), which can be assigned to Antonio di Niccolo di Domenico, to whose production of books of hours a further example can be added. 5 Although made to be put on the market, as shown by the blank space reserved for a coat of arms, the Boston manuscript was precious enough to become part of the celebrated eighteenth-century collection of the due de La Valliere, in Paris.

If the Renaissance production in Florence achieved significant numbers and a certain standardization of text and illustration, aided by the frequent exchange of drawings and patterns among different workshops, some of those illuminated in Venice were illustrated with images comparable to small easel paintings, even in a tiny early-sixteenth century volume, assigned to Benedetto Bordon (cat. no. 234).

One of the foremost examples from the Veneto in Boston collections, however, is a fragmentary book of hours (cat. no. 232), probably illuminated in Mantua; both parts of the manuscript were written by one of the most celebrated calligraphers of the time, Bartolomeo Sanvito, and the second was added for the Marquess Isabella d’Este (illuminated leaves from the first part are in the Musee Conde in Chantilly). Sanvito was Paduan in origin, but he was also was active in Rome, where he spread the fashion for all’antica decoration in the manuscripts illuminated by his collaborators. It was probably Sanvito who already in the 1460s first introduced the adoption of humanistic bookhand into books of hours.

The invention of printing contributed to the dissemination of books of hours in Italy, as shown by the lively market for them which developed in many important towns, such as Venice, Florence, and Naples. These early printed books were frequently hand-illuminated, either with decorations and initials painted within the printed text or through the addition of illuminated parchment leaves. Both features can be seen in the incunable (cat. no. 243) printed in Naples in 1487 by Matthias Moravus (Matteo or Mattia Moravo), who seems to have been producing them already at the end of the 1470s.

The latest Italian devotional book kept in the Boston area, perhaps also the latest manuscript of this type produced in Italy, is the newly discovered prayer book illuminated in 1550 for Pope Julius III (cat. no. 203). Although it, like many Italian books of hours, contains only some of the texts necessary to be classified as a book of hours, this manuscript represents an extraordinary example of a book for private devotion made for a specific Roman pope, displaying a realistic portrait of the pope himself, at the opening. This manuscript raises the issue, frequent when examining Italian books of hours, if they are fragments of larger books or if the devotional books produced in Italy did follow different patterns from the more standardized Northern European examples, as underlined in the opening of this text. Two small books also allow the same question, containing Passion excerpts from the four Gospels together with some additional prayers (cat. no. 138 and Boston, BPL, MS q Med. 128): both are in written in humanistic bookhand and decorated with a type of white vine that seems to point against their being fragments of larger books of hours (in which the humanistic bookhand is usually not accompanied by this sort of decoration). The two manuscripts, one produced in Florence (cat. no. 138) and one in Naples (MS qMed. 128) 7 in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, seem to reveal the existence of a specific type of book for personal devotional reading centered on the Passion lessons.

As can be seen from this all too short survey, the exceptional collections in the Boston area thus provide us with the earliest and latest of Italian books for private devotion hitherto known.