Product Description
Vallecchi has the honour of presenting the San Domenico Missal, conserved in the Museo di San Marco in Florence and, for the first time, reproduced in a valuable edition for bibliophiles. Viewable in part only during the rare occasions of public exhibition in the showcases of the Museo di San Marco, the San Domenico Missal leaves its “refuge” and appears today for the first time in a life-size reproduction, along with a selection of illuminations from the Anthem Books of San Marco by Zanobi Strozzi, student of the Maestro. Printed on special paper expressly produced by the Fedrigoni paper-mill of Verona, the volume presents a corpus of forty-four illuminated panels proposed in all their splendour, thanks to a modern printing technique that exalts their bright colours, while the use of gold tooling makes the edition even more valuable. Published in collaboration with the Museo di San Marco, the volume is enriched by three essays which, edited by museum director Magnolia Scudieri, delineate the figure of Beato Angelico and situate the Missal in the painter’s luminous artistic parabola, and then trace a profile of his school in the figurative works of the aforementioned Zanobi. The introduction on the history of the miniating art in early fifteenth-century Florence has been entrusted to the pen of professor Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto who holds the chair in miniating at the University of Florence. A profound and sensitive scholar of Beato Angelico, in him she recognises the irreplaceable merit of a veritable revolution in the Renaissance sense in the illustration of books. The comment to the tables which takes us by the hand and lead us to interpret their complex and fascinating sacred symbology, is by Sara Giacomelli, also author of the codicological analysis of manuscript 558. Director of the Education Department of the Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino, Maria Paola Masini reveals several of the thousand secrets behind the miniating technique, from the precision of drawing to the brilliance of colours, from the fantasy of decoration to the splendour of gold, that still today, after so many centuries, communicates innumerable emotions to the eye. Embellished by a selection of splendid works by Beato Angelico and other painters of the Florentine milieu of the epoch, the volume represents a just tribute to one of the greatest artists of a city that wrote several of the major pages of art history in the West and where our publishing firm is honoured to reside. The volume is bound by hand in leather and contained in an elegant box. The front cover bears a tooled geometric decoration and four corner studs with a double concentric rosette in fretted brass, fastened with a stud. The back is tooled, has four corner studs and a stud in the middle. The binding is inspired by that of manuscript 515 in the Museo di San Marco in Florence which, for typology and chronology, is closest to the original, given that the binding of today’s Missal in part dates to the XIX century and is therefore no longer the original.
TECHNICAL FEATURES
Format closed: 43 x 59 cm Pages: 208 Edition: 600 copies