Section One

1 PSALTER

Psalter with Canticles and Prayers
Manuscript in Greek; tempera, gold, and ink on parchment
Unidentified (provincial?) monastic scriptorium, Byzantium, middle or second half of 13th century
Spencer Collection, Greek Ms. 1

The psalter held a prominent place in the Byzantine liturgy, and miniatures were frequently included in more opulent copies to accompany the 151 Psalms of King David and a series of Canticles or Odes (Psalm-like songs), excerpted from other books of the Bible. This thirteenth-century Psalter is the work of a single anonymous scribe and, as usual, one or more unnamed artists, who possibly worked in a provincial monastic scriptorium. It contains twenty-one miniatures, seven of which are full-page, placed before and within the text of the Psalms and immediately before the first Ode. Each Psalm also begins with an ornamental initial.

Since they were not working with a narrative form in the Psalms, Byzantine artists commonly did not create their paintings as illustrations to passages in the text, but instead provided psalters with a set of portraits or scenes from the lives of David or of Moses.

This manuscript is open to the full-page frontispiece of “King David with Five Musicians” (fol. 1v), which shows the bearded David in the guise of a Byzantine emperor, gesturing and holding a book, and with a nimbus surrounding his head. The musicians are playing the cymbals, a lute, a square harp, a long horn, and a drum. Opposite, as the headpiece to Psalm 1, is “Christ in Majesty” (fol. 2r).

The manuscript may be seen as a reflection of the revival of the tradition of manuscript illumination and the other visual arts following the defeat of the Latin Empire and restoration in 1261 of Byzantine sovereignty upon the entry of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (reigned 1259–82) into Constantinople.

2 LITURGY

Liturgy of the Greek Orthodox Church
Manuscript in Greek; tempera, gold, and dark brown ink on paper
Unidentified monastic scriptorium, Wallachia, Romania(?), end of the 16th–first half of the 17th century
Spencer Collection, Greek Ms. 3

A late manuscript indebted to the Byzantine tradition, this liturgical book was written and decorated in the style of Luke, metropolitan of Wallachia (a principality of Romania on the lower Danube River), who was a native of Cyprus, where he learned calligraphy, and whose career is documented from 1588 to 1626. It is written in a large rounded archaizing “baroque” liturgical minuscule script. The single anonymous scribe probably had apprenticed with Luke or with scribes of his circle, identified as the Wallachian school of calligraphy but as yet not well studied.

The decoration includes four headpieces and numerous large initials incorporating fusions of fantastic animals, dragons, snakes, birds, angels, plants, and flowers painted in an array of rich colors and heightened with gold. Both the script and ornamentation of Spencer Ms. 3 are similar stylistically to a manuscript copied by Jacques de Ganochora, one of Luke’s students.

The curator of this exhibition wishes to acknowledge the indispensable, new documentation on The New York Public Library’s manuscripts in Greek provided by Dr. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, whose research will be a part of a future comprehensive publication on the Library’s illuminated manuscript holdings.

3 GOSPEL BOOK

Orthodox Eastern Church. Evangelion
Theion kai Hieron Euangelion ... kai aphierothen to potemakariotato kai sophotato patriarche Ierosolymon kyrio kyrio Chrysantho to Notara. Hen Etiesi
Venice: Antonio Bortoli for Nikolaos Saros, 1745
Spencer Collection

From the late fifteenth through the eighteenth century, Venice remained the most vital center for presses printing in Greek, with their books largely marketed to Greeks living under Ottoman rule. This Gospel Book was published at the press founded by Nikolaos Saros, one of the two most important Greek presses in Venice in the seventeenth century. Acquired in 1706 by Antonio Bortoli, the press supposedly continued to operate under Saros’s name until Bortoli’s debt was paid. Unusual for its lavish adornments, the Gospel Book was among the approximately 315 books published with Saros’s printer’s mark. It is dedicated to Chrysanthos Notara, Patriarch of Jerusalem and all Palestine, who may have been its recipient; it was undoubtedly intended as a present for a high church dignitary.

The volume contains four full-page woodcuts of the Evangelists (signed C [G?] R F), headpieces, large decorated initials printed in red, and an engraved architectural and historiated title page, signed Suor Isabella Piccini scolpái (Isabella Piccini, 1644–1734). The original Venetian binding, covered in dark-red velvet, is adorned with silver repoussé mounts: the upper cover with Christ on the cross between the Virgin and St. John, and with busts of the Evangelists and their symbols in the four corners; the lower cover with Christ rising from the tomb. The four silver-cast clasps with catches bear the maker’s mark, L.V.

4 AESOP

Aesop
Fables (“Medici Aesop”)
Manuscript in Greek; tempera, gold, and ink on vellum
Illumination attributed to Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato (1445–1497), Florence, late 15th century
Spencer Collection, Ms. 50

This opening shows two fables on the right (fol. 31r), “The Crested Lark” and “The Fawn and the Deer.” On the left (fol. 30v) is “The Wild Boar and the Fox.” Other fables are shown on the touch-screen installation to your right, which also provides background information on this manuscript.

5 ARISTOTLE

Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)
Opera omnia (Greek)
Edited by Aldus Manutius, Thomas Linacre, Justin Decadyos, Gabriel Braccius, et al.
Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1 November 1495; 29 January 1497–June 1498
Volume 2 of 5 volumes
Rare Books Division

The editio princeps of Aristotle is the major printed achievement i of the Renaissance, producing in the original language the writings of the great philosopher in massive scope. The most elaborate and ambitious fifteenth-century instance of Greek printing, its five super-chancery folio volumes constitute a monument to the art of the book. It comprises all of Aristotle known at the time, plus works by Galen, Theophrastus, Philo Judaeus, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, and others.

The principal philosopher in world history, Aristotle was known universally as “the Philosopher” during the Middle Ages, albeit in Latin translations. One of the prime goals of the humanists was to recover and disseminate the works of classical authors in their original languages. Greek was the language of first importance, and Aristotle was the author of first importance.

Leading an editorial team that reflected the borderless world of humanistic scholarship, Aldus (ca. 1452–1515) issued this edition in two series. The first volume, the Organon or the six works on logic, appeared singly, followed months later by the remaining works in the Aristotelian corpus, in four volumes often bound (like the Library’s copy) as five. Substantial setting-copy manuscripts survive, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The typeface is a conscious effort to reproduce in metal the complex elements of the scribal hand, with numerous ligatures, contractions, and abbreviations that replicate handwriting familiar to literate contemporaries.

6 PLATO

Plato (428?–348? B.C.E.)
Opera omnia (Greek)
Edited by Marcus Musurus
Venice: Aldus Manutius, September 1513
Rare Books Division

Aldus and his colleagues devoted more than a decade and a half to the editing and completion of this first printed edition of Plato. Aldus recorded his intention to publish the complete works of Plato as early as 1497. He mentions in the introductory parts of this volume that he and Musurus, since 1512 a public lecturer for Greek in Venice, had used a large number of manuscripts to establish the text. Some of those manuscripts came from Cardinal Bessarion’s collection, bequeathed to Venice but kept locked away and essentially inaccessible for many decades; indeed, this was one of the very rare occasions on which any scholar had been allowed to use this collection.

The volume is dedicated to Leo X, elected to the papacy the previous March, and one of whose private secretaries was Aldus’s old friend and colleague Pietro Bembo. The long dedication speaks passionately of Aldus’s belief in scholarship and printing as forces against ignorance, and he calls upon the Pope to defend the world of publishing.

Aldus also urges the Pope to sponsor and support his lifelong dream of an Academy to publish the works of Greek antiquity. This would in fact occur, but in Rome as the Gymnasium Caballini Montis, and the publishing would be entrusted to Angelo Colocci. The so-called Aldine Academy, essentially a social group of leading Greek scholars that met sporadically in the two locations of the Aldine Press between the late 1490s and Aldus’s death in 1515, was devoted to the editing of Greek authors, and it was based upon the academy of Plato.

7 PLATO

Percy Bysshe Shelley (English, 1792–1822)
Fragment from Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Republic
Autograph manuscript, March 1819–March 1821
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle

Shelley’s troubled career as a student at Syon House Academy, at Eton, and at University College, Oxford, nevertheless prepared him well for his occasional but lifelong pursuits of reading and translating classical literature in Latin and Greek. In 1818, Shelley and his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, left England to live in Italy, and during their first summer in Bagni di Lucca, Shelley translated Plato’s Symposium.

 In Rome, while writing Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama (taking its name from a supposed lost play by Aeschylus), Shelley may have begun his translation of Plato’s Republic (a two-page fragment of which is shown here), one of many classical sources from which he drew inspiration. Plato, among other instances of mentioning Prometheus in his works, discussed the god’s gift of fire as one of several gifts from the gods that enabled human beings to survive on earth. Mary Shelley’s most famous work was, of course, her novel Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus.

8 HERODOTUS

Herodotus (ca. 484—ca. 430–420 B.C.E.)
Historiae
Venice: Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis, 29 March 1494
Spencer Collection

Born in the Persian-controlled city of Halicarnassus, Herodotus was the author of a nine-book account of the wars between the Greek states and Persia (490–479 B.C.E.) and of Persian gods and kings, geographies, and ethnic origins of conquered populations, enlivened by digressions on noteworthy personalities, local lore, rumors, and sex. On completion, it was the longest prose work in Greek up to its time and remains the earliest major historical narrative to have survived from antiquity. Herodotus’s historiai (investigations) were based on exhaustive research and far-flung travels throughout the Hellenic realm, the Persian Empire, and beyond to the Scythian Black Sea coast. In his later years, Herodotus became renowned for paid public recitations of his work-in-progress and was alleged to have gained both fame and fortune by extolling Athens at the athletic games in Olympia. Long considered the first true historian, Herodotus was, above all else, interested in telling a compelling story.

Lorenzi Valla (1407–1457), one of the most influential of the early Renaissance humanists, produced a number of corrected Latin translations of sacred and classical Greek texts, including Aesop’s fables and the histories of Thucydides (1452) and Herodotus (1457), both commissioned by Pope Nicholas V.

The 1494 edition of Valla’s translation of Herodotus’s Historiae, open here to its title page, is a rare instance of an early printed edition of an ancient text adorned by any illustration. Within the white-on-black woodcut frame is a central panel showing Herodotus crowned with laurel by Apollo in a fifteenth-century–style study. The scene below depicts the Near Eastern mother of the gods, Cybele, with her lover Attis and other figures and includes a loom bearing the initials S C P I, thus possibly identifying the designer of the woodcut as the obscure engraver Stefano Pellegrini da Cesena.

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