{"id":350,"date":"2018-03-29T10:36:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T09:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/?p=350"},"modified":"2018-03-29T13:00:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T12:00:40","slug":"travelling-images-venetian-illustrated-books-at-the-university-of-edinburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/2018\/03\/29\/travelling-images-venetian-illustrated-books-at-the-university-of-edinburgh\/","title":{"rendered":"Travelling Images: Venetian Illustrated Books at the University of Edinburgh"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a micro exhibition, of illustrated books from Renaissance Italy, running in CRC from 13th April to 15th June.\u00a0 This is in collaboration with Linda Borean of the Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Udine and Laura Moretti of the University of St. Andrews, and their project:\u00a0Venetian Renaissance prints, drawings and illustrated books in Scottish collections.\u00a0https:\/\/arts.st-andrews.ac.uk\/venice-in-scotland\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

There are very many wonderful illustrated books from Venice in our collections; far more than we have space to exhibit.\u00a0 Over the next few weeks we will be posting about the ones we have included, and some that we couldn’t fit in.\u00a0 On 16th April Laura will be giving a talk in CRC.\u00a0 We plan to get out everything we have blogged about for that.<\/p>\n

Laura will be posting further information on the blog of her current project\u00a0Thinking 3D<\/em>.\u00a0https:\/\/www.thinking3d.ac.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Our first post is by Elizabeth Quarmby Lawrence, Rare Books Librarian<\/p>\n

Girolamo Marafioti (1567-1626) De arte reminiscentiae,<\/em>\u00a0 (Venice : Jo Baptistam Bertonum, 1602.)\u00a0 (Edinburgh University Library: EE.13.36\/1)<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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\u201cThe art of memory\u201d survives in the modern world mostly in the form of self-help books and motivational training courses, but it actually has a long and distinguished history, back to classical antiquity.<\/p>\n

Classical lawyers and politicians, needing to be able to make lengthy, formally-structured speeches from memory, used the techniques of artifical memory.\u00a0 In their imagination they would turn each of the points of their speech into a strong visual image, and then arrange the images in order within a structure they could easily remember.\u00a0 Typically this would be a building, either real and familiar, or created in the imagination for the purpose.<\/p>\n

These techniques\u00a0remained\u00a0in common use well into the seventeenth century.\u00a0 In a culture where public affairs were still largely conducted orally, the ability to speak fluently, persuasively and at length, in public, was vital to a professional career. \u00a0As well as being useful to lawyers and\u00a0politicians, artificial memory techniques were useful to students, whose academic exercises and examinations were largely based around oral disputations.\u00a0 The techniques were popular with the Friars, whose lives were dedicated to preaching and teaching religious knowledge, and who had to be able to explain complex doctrine accurately.<\/p>\n

The technique of\u00a0artificial memory was passed down from Classical antiquity through three texts \u2013 Cicero\u2019s De Oratore<\/em>, an anonymous handbook Ad C. Herennium, <\/em>and Quintilian\u2019s Institut<\/em>io Oratoria.<\/em>\u00a0 In the Middle Ages it was refined, improved and expanded on.\u00a0 \u00a0This continued into the Renaissance, where artificial memory was often elaborated to the point that it became an intellectual game, rather than a practical technique.\u00a0 The Renaissance had a fascination for imagery, symbolism, emblems and hidden meanings, and keen interest in imposing a structure on knowledge.\u00a0 The symbolism of artificial memory very easily plays to all of these, and elaborate symbolism and word games can easily be incorporated into it.\u00a0 In some Renaissance examples of artificial memory it is difficult to tell which is the material to be memorised and which is the structure supposed to hold it.<\/p>\n

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This little handbook was written within this late tradition.\u00a0 Instead of using locations in a building as the places to lodge the memories, it uses both sides of both hands to create 92 places, each marked with a symbol – which had itself to be memorised before it could be used as a tool to remember anything else.<\/p>\n

Many of the illustrated books which have been included in the project Venetian Renaissance prints, drawings and illustrated books in Scottish collections <\/em><\/strong>are high-quality, luxury productions.\u00a0 This little book was produced with quite different ambitions.\u00a0 It was\u00a0intended for a relatively popular market \u2013 it was reprinted several times, including in an Italian translation \u2013 and the illustrations are entirely practical and very necessary to explain the text.<\/p>\n

It is not clear how this copy reached Edinburgh, but in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it passed through the hands of two bibliophiles, or bibliomaniacs.\u00a0 First came Charles-Louis Van Bavi\u00e8re, (1767-1815), Secretary of the Academy and Faculty of Law, Brussels.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0His professional life seems not to have preoccupied him much: he was a dedicated bibliophile with a reputation for having an eye for a bargain, and for finding unlikely treasures in improbable-looking sales.\u00a0 After his death, his huge library was sold at auction over 22 days, in Brussels in 1817.\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

This sort of sale undoubtedly appealed to the book\u2019s next owner, the antiquarian and legendary bibliomaniac\u00a0Richard Heber (1773 \u2013 1833), whose vast library, collected all over Europe, and housed in half a dozen separate locations, was sold after his death in a series of sixteen sales, in England, France and Belgium, realizing the then enormous sum of more than \u00a360,000.\u00a0 Books from both these scattered collections are in wide circulation today, readily identifiable from their owner\u2019s bookplates and ink stamp.<\/p>\n

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We have a micro exhibition, of illustrated books from Renaissance Italy, running in CRC from 13th April to 15th June.\u00a0 This is in collaboration with Linda Borean of the Universit\u00e0 degli Studi di Udine and Laura Moretti of the University … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk\/rarebooks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}