Humanists and bookbinders: The origins and diffusion of the humanistic bookbinding, 1459-1559, with a census of historiated plaquette and medallion bindings of the Renaissance

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 4to (30.5 cm), xix, 296 pp., 5 color plates, 198 black & white illustrations. Publisher's cloth & dust jacket (dj slightly rubbed at extremities, small tear to the spine). First edition, a revision of a series of lectures delivered at the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1979. "In this important study of North Italian and Parisian bindings (the first for over sixty years), the author has elegantly considered the twin claims of ornament and patronage. The decorative possibilities of bookbinding were transformed during the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Gilt-tooling, polychrome filigree, architectural and plaquette ornament replaced Gothic decoration in blind. This transformation, wholly independent of the contemporaneous invention of printing in Germany, was the work of a small group of antiquaries and scribes centered in Padua. Elements taken from Islamic bookbindings and metalwork, antique monuments and inscriptions, and classical gems in the Gonzaga and Medici collections were adapted to create a new style. Italian men of letters, foreign students returning from the universities of Bologna and Padua, and collectors enthusiastic for the New Learning carried the Paduan fashion to Central and Northern Europe. Francis I's respect for learning and the patronage of two successive kings combined to kindle a final blaze of creative brilliance in sixteenth-century France." (from the blurb)