Object details
Object number
2.a.2.1
Creator(s)
Title
Commission of Doge Francesco Donato to Vincenzo Gritti as Lieutenant of Udine
Date
1546
Medium
Ink, paint and gold on vellum
Language
Italian (Venetian dialect)
Publication Place
Venice
Binding Description
16th century. Bound by the Mendoza Binder. Leather tooled in blind and gold
Dimensions
24 x 17 x 4.5 cm (9 7/16 x 6 11/16 x 1 3/4 in.)
Signatures, inscriptions, and markings
Signed and dated: H. Murianus 27 July 1546
Provenance
Collection of Vincenzo Gritti (active around 1530-1547), Lieutenant of Udine, 1546-1547.
Collection of the scholar and critic Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner from Charles Eliot Norton on 3 July 1903 for $2,500. (with 18 other Venetian manuscripts)
Commentary
The elaborate illumination at the front of this manuscript refers to the institutions that governed Venetian life, in order of importance from top to bottom: piety (represented by the Virgin and Child), the state (represented by the Venetian lion), the doge, and nobility (represented by the Gritti famiily arms). The Serenissima's power is conveyed by the military motifs in the border. The male saints are the patrons and namesakes of the doge and Vincenzo Gritti, who received this book for his election as Lieutenant of Udine, a city in north-east Italy. The miniature is by the most skilled and fashionable illuminator of commissioni in sixteenth-century Venice. He takes his name from another illumination with equally graceful figures and luminous bold colors, which is signed 'T.° Ve. painted this 1528'. The signature, however, was added later as a ploy to attribute the splendid work to the most celebrated painter of the period, Tiziano Vecellio, called Titian (about 1488-1576).
Bibliography
Isabella Stewart Gardner. A Choice of Manuscripts and Bookbindings from the Library of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Fenway Court. (Boston, 1922), pp. 35-6, 98.
Seymour de Ricci and W.J. Wilson. Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada. Vol. 1. (New York, 1935), p. 933, no. 17.
Hilliard Goldfarb. Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy. Exploring Treasures in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum III. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1992), pp. 32, 46.
Helena Szépe. "Isabella Stewart Gardner's Venetian manuscripts" in Elizabeth Anne McCauley et al. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 2004), p. 235.
Anne-Marie Eze. "Italian Illuminated manuscripts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum." Rivista di storia della miniatura (2012), pp. 81, 91-92, 94, nos. 8, 9.
University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, no. 42822, accessed 4 November 2016. http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/record.html?q=42822&id=SCHOENBERG_42822&
Helena Katalin Szépe in Jeffery F. Hamburger et al. Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Newton: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2016), pp. 16, 241, 249-51, no. 206, ill. f.1r.
Gallery
Long Gallery
Case
Dante Case
Rights and reproductions
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