MS 198 of the Civica Biblioteca Guarneriana

Résumé du livre

Ms. 198 of the Civica Biblioteca Guarneriana (San Daniele del Friuli) is a finely illuminated Book of Hours on parchment, produced in Florence in the early sixteenth century. This volume proposes, for the first time, an attribution of its decoration to the workshop of Giovanni di Giuliano Boccardi (1460–1529), known as Boccardino the Elder, on the basis of close stylistic and ornamental comparison. It analyses the manuscript’s structure, text, and pictorial programme, and reassesses the damaged heraldry on fol. 1r as evidence for its original patronage and intended user. The study also traces the codex’s later history—its early eighteenth-century binding, its likely passage through Giusto Fontanini, and its arrival in the Guarneriana—while addressing the loss of the opening full-page miniatures.

Carla Rossi is a philologist and codicologist, specialising in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. She is the Scientific Director of the Centro Scaligero degli Studi Danteschi. Her research focuses on Books of Hours, manuscript illumination, and the reconstruction of dismembered codices. She is the author of monographs and scholarly studies on illuminated manuscripts, textual transmission, and the history of collections. In 2025 she published an article on biblioclasm and the legal protection of manuscripts in the Harvard Art Law Review.