Excerpt from Reproductions From Illuminated Manuscripts: Fifty Plates From Mss. In the R. Medicean Laurentian Library, With Preface and Illustrative Notes

These reproductions from one of the most notable Italian collections may well, I deem, furnish useful ma terial for the yet unwritten history of miniature painting in relation to illuminated manuscripts. Up to the present this history has been neglected both by bibliographers and art critics, as the ornamentation of books comes neither within the scope of palaeography nor within that of the history of painting. The miniatures which are pre served in the Medicea Laurenziana and rank among its most vaunted treasures, are in such number and of such great worth as of themselves to provide materials for a fine and rich collection of reproductions. They range from the VI cent. To the XVIII cent., and contain examples of every age and every school. For this volume, the first of a series which it is hoped may comprehend miniatures and valuable manuscripts in various Ita lian collections, I have selected only a few of the most characteristic that are to be seen in the glazed cases, at present all too scarce, in the Laurenziana, whose treasures it is my ambition to expose in an ordered Exhibition that shall form the M useo del Libra, when the Salone di Miche langiolo is to have its completion in the Tribuna, desi gned by the artist and which I ardently desire to see erected as the first saloon of the future Museo.

In compiling this Album we have followed the exampleset by the British Museum in its Reproductions from I llu minuted Manuscripts edited by George F. Warner, and I have endeavoured to give a short and complete description explanatory of the brief notes placed below each facsimile.

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