Writing and Images from the Vatican Library
Edited by Ambrogio M. Piazzoni with Francesca Manzari
The Bible has inspired scholarly and artistic achievements all over the world since Late Antiquity. The largest and most diverse collection of Bibles, in both their calligraphic and illuminative expression, is archived at the Vatican Library. The scholars who contributed to this volume were given unprecedented access to the Vatican Library archive and, while focusing on the written and illustrative themes of the Bible, have created the most comprehensive chronology to date.
This volume is a journey led by major international scholars through the Bible's development from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance era, allowing all readers of the Bible to marvel at the wisdom of the writings and beauty of the illustrations, many available here for the first time.
Ambrogio M. Piazzoni (1951) is the vice prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, first layman to hold this position. A graduate of Sapienza-University of Rome, educated in medieval history and specialized in palaeography, he spent a number of years as a cataloguer of manuscripts in the Vatican Library before taking charge for the introduction of the computerized cataloguing of manuscripts. As vice prefect (1999), he is also the scientific director of cataloguing of the Vatican Library manuscripts and director of the Library's publishing department. He teaches Latin palaeography, which pertains to both writing and illuminations, at the Augustinianum University in Rome. He has published a number of books and more than a hundred articles in scholarly journals and collective works on subjects related to medieval cultural history, biblical exegesis in the Middle Ages, Church history, and history of the Vatican Library.
Francesca Manzari (1967), PhD, is researcher in history of medieval art at Sapienza-University of Rome, where she teaches history of illumination. She has taken part, as author and part of the editorial staff, in the Enciclopedia dell'arte Medievale and in the journal Arte Medievale. In 2015 she won the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship for research at Harvard University. She has published several volumes and extensively in international journals, also in various languages. She was on the advisory board for the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts from Boston Collections (Harvard University; Boston, September 2016-January 2017), ed. J. Hamburger, W. Stoneman, A. M. Eze, L. Fagin-Davis, N. Netzer. Her research has centered on liturgical and devotional books and manuscript illumination in Avignon and Italy. She is currently working on a book on illumination in Rome during the Great Western Schism.
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