- - BREVIARIO GRIMANI - 1970

Grimani Breviary. Venice, Electa, around 1970. Dimensions: 28 x 22 cm. 307 pages, with 110 color plates reproducing the miniatures from the original. Hardcover binding in red cloth. Comes in an original slipcase. Critical essay with an introduction by Mario Salmi, commentary on the plates by Gian Lorenzo Mellini, and a presentation by Giorgio Ferrari. The slipcase is in faux leather. Two medallions are applied to the upper cover and the box. In good condition — two pages appear to have been remounted with slight misalignment.

Breviary according to the customs of the Roman curia, belonging to the Grimani.
Venice, National Library of Marciana, cod. Lat. I, 99 (=2138) - full digitization available on Internet Culturale

The Grimani Breviary (approximately 280 x 195 mm) is one of the most complex codes produced in Flanders, around the second decade of the 16th century.
Displays a large number of refined miniatures (50 per full page, 18 smaller figures), and decoration is present on all 832 sheets. In the images, the invention is rich and sometimes reveals an unexpected iconography.
The numerous miniatures are positioned at the top in terms of quality within the catalogs of the artists who worked on them.

The text, a Breviary according to the Franciscan methods as was normally adopted at the time, is written in a regular manner to produce a product of great prestige.
Artistic historiography is studying the specific interventions of various miniators, distinguishing the different hands within the refined Flemish flowering of the period.

It is an artistic production characterized by lenticular vision and attention to detail, situated at a very particular moment in the history of miniature art, when drawing, technique, subjects, and the quantity and importance of production are very close and parallel between miniature and panel painting.

In the manuscript, on the edge of f. 81r and therefore in a place not particularly significant within the sequence of miniatures, the arms of Antonio Siciliano, chamberlain of Massimiliano Sforza, were originally inserted.

In the absence of news regarding the patronage and destination of the code, it was hypothesized that the excellent manuscript was brought to Italy by the chamberlain and immediately sold to Cardinal Domenico Grimani (1461-1523), who certainly had it in his hands by 1520.

In fact, it dates back to that year, or shortly after the probable dating of the code based on stylistic considerations, the first record of Domenico Grimani's ownership of the very precious Gantobrugge illuminated Breviary, which arrived in Venice at a time of great appreciation for Flanders painting.

However, we know nothing positive about the manuscript's first story, which was supposed to be conceived from the beginning as a great work of art, rivaling the famous Très riches heures, later known as those of the Duke of Berry, a masterpiece by the Limbourg brothers (now in Chantilly).

The most well-known part of the Breviary is the initial calendar, entirely figurative and, precisely, modeled on the exemplary example of the Très riches heures, characterized by the naturalism of the scenes, and in which we recognize the work of the previously mentioned Horenbout.

Full-page scenes placed opposite the pages of each month's calendar, also framed with small scenes of contemporary life, depict a sequence of images portraying the contemporary life of the court, as well as that of the bourgeoisie and the peasant world, reflecting the new stratification of society.

It was mainly those scenes—the magic of snow in January, the banquet table of the Lord, the hunting scene, the nocturnal light—that aroused the wonder of the ambassadors or the visiting royalty who were able to access the Treasure of the ducal church of San Marco and then the most precious objects of the Marciana Library, after the fall of the Serenissima.

Indeed, left by testament to the Venetian State, but remaining in the hands of the Grimani heirs with alternating fortunes until 1592, the splendid manuscript was then preserved in the Sanctuary of the Venetian State, entrusted to the care of the very same Procurators who oversaw the ducal Church, and later in the nearby Treasury of the ducal Chapel.

Meanwhile, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the codex was adorned with metallic ornaments applied to the cover in red velvet, as was customary for official volumes, those of greater prestige, and also, as in this case, to mark the distinguished belonging of the codex.
In the center of the front plate, an effigy in profile of Cardinal Domenico Grimani (d. 1523) is applied in the form of a medal; similarly, on the back plate, there is a portrait of Antonio Grimani, who was doge from 1521 until his death in 1523, and the father of the same Domenico.