This manuscript, written in an extremely elegant humanistic minuscule, comprises a fragment of the Book of Hours, MS. Varia 89 at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, created for Ippolita Maria Sforza, Duchess of Calabria, and with an inscription by the Florentine copyist Alessandro da Verrazzano¹.

The decoration of the manuscript has instead been recognised for some time as the youthful work of Attavante Attavanti, one of the most sought-after illuminators in Florence in the late 15th and early 16th century, to the point that he was chosen in 1503 to be part of a committee charged with deciding the siting of Michelangelo’s David.² Among his considerable production of illuminated codices, intended forsecular and ecclesiastical patrons of different nationalities and often of a very high standing, Attavanti produced a series of small devotional books, such as the Hours of Laudomia de Medici of 1502 (London, The British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 30),³ which stand out for their lavish decoration but are characterised by the absence of archaeological citations and of the complex architectural frames present in the artist’s most important manuscripts.

Further research is required regarding the date the MS. Varia 89 entered the Savoy collection, which provided the main core of the manuscript collection at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, just as we still need to gain an understanding of whether the dismemberment of the manuscript, from which the portion now in the Cerruti Collection derived, took place during its time in the Savoy collection.

Giovanna Saroni

¹ Regarding the liturgical composition of the manuscript in the Biblioteca Reale, decorated by two full-page miniatures (fol. 21v [Crucifixion], fol. 60v [Prayer in the garden]) and three historiated initials (fol. 22 [Flagellation],fol. 61 [Kiss of Judas], fol. 68 [Pentecost]),
see Amiet 1979, pp. 662-663. The scribal inscription is on fol. 76: “Alexander Verrazanus escripsit”. On Alessandro da Verrazzano, pupil of Antonio Sinibaldi and author of more than thirty manuscripts: A. C. de la Mare, “New Research on Humanistic Scribes in Florence”, in Garzelli 1985, vol. I, pp. 472-473, 480-481; Regnicoli 2012, pp. 253-289.

² Per la bibliografia essenziale su Vante di Gabriello di Vante Attavanti, detto Attavante: Cipriani 1962, pp. 526-530; Galizzi 2004, pp. 975-979.

³ Il manoscritto, che è digitalizzato (https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=8138&CollID=58&NStart=30), fu decorato insieme ad altri tre importanti miniatori fiorentini: Alexander J. J. G. [2016] 2020, pp. 37, 257-259.