Book-bindings and the global middle ages

Matthew Holford, Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, writes:

Last week I organized a show-and-tell for students from the Department of Continuing Education studying the undergraduate certificate in the History of Art. One of the difficulties in selecting material was responding to the course’s emphasis on what has been called the ‘global turn’ in art history with its shift away from an exclusive focus on artefacts from Christian Europe and an increased focus on cross-cultural connections.

This is a potential challenge for a library where curatorial expertise and responsibility is very much structured according to linguistic and geographical boundaries. Nevertheless, excellent examples of interactions between European and Islamic art can be found in fifteenth-century Italian book-bindings, of which the Bodleian has an important collection. Connections between Italy and the Islamic world were extensive, as a result both of trade and diplomacy, and manuscripts were among the items crossing the Mediterranean. Books in Arabic are recorded in a number of contemporary Italian inventories, and Islamic books from the Mamluk sultanate (centred on modern Egypt and Syria) provided the most important models for the development of decorated leather bindings in fifteenth-century Italy.

Bodleian MS. E. D. Clarke 28, right (lower) cover

Historians of bookbinding have identified two main phases of development. The first was centred in Florence from around the second quarter of the century and came to be recognized by contemporaries as ‘modo fiorentino’, ‘Florentine style’. It was characterized by borders of geometrically arranged ‘twisted rope’ patterns, in blind, with roundels punched in gilt, often with a centrepiece and four cornerpieces. Our example above (MS. E. D. Clarke 28) is on a manuscript of Terence copied in 1466 (the four clasps, on the other hand, are a typically Italian feature).

A second line of development is associated with humanists active around Padua in the 1460s. Again their decoration is characterized by ropework borders and a circular or vesical-shaped centrepiece: the crucial innovation is tooling in gilt. Although there are earlier Italian examples of gilt tooling the Paduan bindings, borrowing from Islamic influences, were the first to fully realize its artistic possibilities. An example in the Bodleian (MS. Auct. F. 4. 33) is on a copy of Martial’s Epigrams written by the famous scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito probably in Padua in the 1460s.

A final binding (MS. Canon. Ital. 78), on a manuscript of Petrarch written in Florence in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, shows even stronger Islamic influence. The previous two bindings have wooden boards; this has very thin pasteboards, flush with the text block, in common with most contemporary Islamic bindings. The insides of the covers have decorated leather pastedowns (known as doublures), again very typical of Islamic bindings.

MS. Canon. Ital. 78, right (lower) inside cover, showing doublure, and stained endleaf; traces of flap visible at the edge of the cover

A final Islamic feature is a right-to-left envelope flap [https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob/concept/1343 ], now lost, but small traces remain. In fact Islamic characteristics are so marked that an Islamic origin for the binding has been suggested. The decoration is Ottoman in character, and although the manuscript has endleaves of Western paper, stained purple in an Italian style, Anthony Hobson’s intriguing suggestion was that ‘a Florentine merchant took the works of his favourite poet with him to Istanbul and had them bound there’. That suggestion needs to be reconsidered in the light of the substantial body of research on Islamic bindings that has appeared since Hobson wrote: but regardless of its exact origin, this binding is a powerful illustration of the influence of the Islamic world on Italian decorative arts.

— with thanks to Andrew Honey, Bodleian Conservation