Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, Bellum Iugurthinum (Histories)
In Latin
Parchment
Copied by Bartolomeo San Vito for Bernardo Bembo
1471-84
Another great book collector of the fifteenth century was Bernardo Bembo, Venetian diplomat and patrician, the father of the more famous Pietro Bembo. A number of Bembo's manuscripts were written by Bartolomeo San Vito, who is widely held to be the finest scribe of the Renaissance. San Vito was born in Padua and worked in Mantua, Rome, and Naples before returning to his native city. He worked closely with his illuminator, a disciple of Mantegna, to create a new style of frontispiece. Florentine humanists in the earlier part of the century had revived the "white-vine stem" form of decoration which they thought to be ancient but in fact was twelfth-century and Tuscan. The Paduan/Mantuan school of illuminators, working closely with antiquaries such as Fra Giocondo of Verona, Felice Feliciano, and the artist Mantegna, evolved a new, more classical style. This style had no direct ancient models, but was a pastiche of antique decorative elements, such as urns, medallions, garlands and putti. Its major innovations were the introduction of capital letters modelled on ancient inscriptions (in place of the modified Gothic capitals employed by early Tuscan humanists) and the treatment of the title page as though it were an inscribed stone monument or architectural gateway into the book--features which became common in the frontispieces of sixteenth-century printed books. This manuscript was later owned by Pope Julius II, whose coat of arms was painted over that of Bembo.
