Giulio Clovio

2001 facsimile edition of the so-called Farnese Hours published by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in association with Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt (ADEVA) of Graz, Austria. The manuscripts’s calligraphic text was written by Francesco Monterchi, secretary to Pier Luigi Farnese, the father of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who commissioned the Croatian-born painter Giulio Clovio to decorate the book with twenty-six lavishly-detailed full-page miniatures, and to illuminate a few dozen more pages with elaborate border-decorations, a task which reportedly took Clovio ten years to complete. The facsimile pages are followed by a Praface courtesy of Miroslav Begović; a long essay about the manuscript by William M. Voelkle, and a biographical study of Clovio by Ivan Golub. All in all, a beautiful volume.… (mais)