Virgil, Æneid; Italy (Ferrara), 1456

Title

Virgil, Æneid; Italy (Ferrara), 1456

Shelfmark

Christ Church MS. 113

Place of origin

Italy (Ferrara)

Date

1456

Language

Latin

Italian

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Parchment (FSOS)

Physical extent

Fols: iii + 158 (numbered fols 1–156, but there are unnumbered leaves after fols 111 and 152) + v (numbered fols 157–60, 160 bis). All flyleaves paper added with binding (the very first and very last marbled), except fol. 157 and 158 which are parchment from the original binding, blank and unruled. (to the bounds, not the line ends)

Hands

Written in a humanist littera antiqua with frequent ligatures and rounded feet to many letters by Matteo Contugi of Volterra.

Matteo Contugi, who must have been born by 1429 and who died in 1493, was active as a scribe in several north Italian locales. There are two recent and independent reconstructions of his career: Maria Gabriella Critelli, ‘Per la carrier di Matteo Contugi. A proposito di un testimone delle orazioni di Giovanni Antonio Campano (MS BAV, Urb. lat. 324) e della sua datazione’ in Ambrogio M. Piazzoni ed., Studi in onore del Cardinale Raffaele Farina, Studi e Testi 477–78, 2 vols (Vatican City, 2013), 1:251–302, and David S. Chambers, ‘Matteo Contugi of Volterra (d. 1493): scribe and secret agent’ in Robert Black, Jill Kraye and Laura Nuvoloni ed., Palaeography, Manuscript Illumination and Humanism in Renaissance Italy: Studies in Memory of A. C. de la Mare (London, 2016), 171–198. Chambers provides a listing of twenty-two manuscripts attributed to him (186–89, this manuscript and its companion, MS 114, at 187). Twelve of those codices are signed, with the Benedictines of Le Bouveret, Colophons des manuscrits occidentaux des origines au xvie siècle, 5 vols, Spicilegii Friburgensis Subsidia 2–6 (Fribourg, 1965–79), 4:166–67, noting ten of them (nos 13398–13408; this MS is their no. 13406, misassigned to Corpus Christi College; their listing omits Florence: Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Plut. 54. 20 and BAV, MS Urb. lat. 548, and has duplicate entries, at no. 13400 and 13408, for BL, MS Yates Thompson 7). Contugi also appears, as scribe no. 291, in Albert Derolez, Codicologie des manuscrits en écriture humanistique sur parchemin, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1984), 1:184 (with this MS and MS 114 as catalogue no. 605, at 2:94).

Punctuation by point, punctus elevatus, and virgula.

Decoration

At the opening of the introductory verses, six- and three-line red and blue Roman square capitals, unflourished; the same introduce the verses summarising each book. At the opening ‘Arma’ (fol. 2), an eleven-line gold Roman capital with blue, red and green vinework (heavily speckled with a pattern of three white dots), penwork and floral borders head and foot, that at the foot with a blazon. The arms are ‘barry or and sable, on a chief gules a rose argent’; Chambers (172) notes the suggestion that they are the coat-of-arms of the Corboli (or Calboli) family of Forlì. At the openings of the books, two- to four-line gold Roman square capitals on green and violet grounds. Watson calls the direction ‘Ferrarese’, an identification which can be corroborated by noting that the bianchi girari initial is in an identical style with those that appear in Oxford: Corpus Christi College, MS. 79, a manuscript of Livy written by Antonio Farina, who dates and localises his work to Ferrara, 1458; it is Watson, DMO, no. 769 (1:127). See, for our manuscript and the next, AT no. 986 (102) and plate lxix (fol. 2).

Binding

Green morocco over millboards, gold-stamped outline border, and floral decoration in the compartments on the spine, s. xviii. Sewn on five thongs. In the top spine compartment, in gilt on a red leather label, ‘M.S. Virgilii Eneidos liber 1456’. Pastedowns and endleaves modern marbled paper, a ChCh bookplate on the front pastedown.

Provenance

The scribe identifies himself in the colophon but names the place of production only by the initial ‘F’. It is on the basis of the illumination that this manuscript can be firmly localised to Ferrara, a city which he is known to have been resident at several points of his life (Chambers, 175–76). If the recent attribution of the arms is correct, the manuscript may have been intended to be transported to Forlì. Certainly, this and its companion volume remained in north-east Italy in their early years, as is shown by the pentrials (s. xvex) at fol. 158v, which include a repeated couplet in Italian ‘Chi serue a Dio cum purita de core | Vive contento & poi saluato More’, and the address, ‘Magnifico et generoso Domino ant Contarino’, suggesting it may have been present in Venetian lands, by someone seeking to ingratiate themselves with the patrician Contarini family (the Antonio is presumably not the man who was to be patriarch of Venice, 1509–1524, considering this is an address to a non-cleric). There is also, at the preceding recto, the motto ‘virtutem pueri primis discatis ab annis’ in a humanist cursive which also appears in our MS 114 (s. xv2).

Donated by John Moore. The gift is recorded by Edward Smallwell at fol. ii: ‘D. D. Joannes Moore, S. T. P. hujusce Ædis Canonicus et Sub-Decanus An. 1766’; Smallwell also entered it in the Donors’ Register, MS LR 1, for 1766 (p. 249b) where Moore gave ‘Virgilii Codicem Manu Matthei Domini Herculani de Vulterris ss An. 1456 2 Voll. 4º’, i.e. both this volume and the next. Moore matriculated at Pembroke College in 1745, and received degrees of BA, MA, BD, and DD in 1748, 1751, and 1763 (both degrees in divinity), respectively. He was canon of Christ Church from 1763, eventually bishop of Bangor (1775–83) and archbishop of Canterbury (1783–1805). He died in 1805, aged 75 (AOmod , 975; Nigel Aston in Oxford DNB). Edward Smallwell also wrote the New Library shelfmark above the donation note at fol. ii: ‘C.1.’ (See Appendix IV).