#niccolo niccoli

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

if messenger apps existed in the late 14th and early 15th century, Poggio and Niccoli would have crashed them repeatedly because they could not stop writing each other and I think that’s very sweet 

[forislynx]

Mellan två celler, i början av en vid korridor, upptäckte jag en häpnadsväckande vrå i klostret [San Marco i Florens]. Forskarna tror att den platsen hyste det första moderna biblioteket. Där fanns storslagna böcker som humanisten Niccolò Niccoli testamenterat till staden 'för allmänhetens bästa, för samhällsservice, för att de ska vara tillgängliga för alla på en öppen plats, där kunskapstörstande människor, liksom på bördiga åkrar, kan skörda bildningens goda frukt'. Cosimo den äldre å sin sida bekostade byggnationen av ett renässansbibliotek till klostret som ritades av arkitekten Michelozzo. Medeltidens mörka rum och fastkedjade böcker ersattes med de nya tidernas emblem: en stor sal, badande i naturligt ljus, ritad för att underlätta läsning och gynna samtal. I dåtidens källor beskrivs bibliotekets ursprungliga yttre med beundran: ett takvalv som hölls uppe av två fina pelarrader, stora fönster åt båda sidor, grå sandsten, ljusgröna väggar för att inge ro, hyllor fulla med böcker, och sextiofyra bänkar av cypressträ där munkarna och besökarna kunde sitta och läsa, skriva och kopiera texter. Tillgängligheten utifrån förverkligade Niccolòs dröm: hans samling med fyrahundra manuskript var åtkomlig för alla litteraturälskare, florentinare som ditresande. Biblioteket invigdes 1444 och var - efter [biblioteket i Alexandrias] förstörelse - kontinentens första offentliga bibliotek.

Irene Vallejo, Papyrus : om bokens födelse i den antika världen

[burberrycanary]

The end notes for The Probable Stars are too long to makes sense having on AO3, so I’m including them here.

NB:

• Claudius Ptolemy: 2nd-century Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer. Tetrabiblos was a foundational text on astrology for more than a thousand years.

• Robert Grosseteste: a 13th-century English scholastic philosopher, theologian and scientist who wrote De sphera on astronomy and De luce on cosmogony.

• Robert of Chester: a 12th-century Arabist who translated the first book on alchemy to reach Europe, Liber de compositione alchimiae.

• Jabir ibn Hayyan: a 8th-century Islamic chemist and alchemist, astronomer and astrologer, among many other things. Matthew is apparently unconcerned with the pseudo-Geber controversy. (Does he have the inside scoop?)

• Sidereus Nuncius: Starry Messenger by Galileo. The first published scientific work based on observations made through a telescope. It's a lovely design artifact, as well.

• On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura by the 1st-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa. The manuscript was rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. (I assume Matthew was team Valla in the very public Bracciolini-Valla feud. Did Niccolo de Niccoli hook Matthew up with De rerum natura during his decade-and-a-half “borrowing” of the manuscript from Bracciolini? And, wow, Matthew would have fit in so well amongst this bunch of early renaissance obsessive drama queens.)

• ni muer ni viu ni no guaris: from Quant l'aura doussa s'amarzis by Cercamon, a 12th-century troubadour who composed in Old Occitan and is credited with inventing the Provençal dirge.

• The title of this fic comes from You are tired, (I think) by E. E. Cummings, which includes this amazing stanza:

You have played,

(I think)

And broke the toys you were fondest of,

And are a little tired now;

Tired of things that break, and—

Just tired.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Living for the chaos of Poggio and Niccoli’s friendship. One can’t leave Florence because he’s too fucking finicky and fussy to travel and the other is too distracted by the hot chicks with their pussy’s out to focus on manuscript hunting

[zeynepinyerii]

Zevk Veren Esmer İstanbul Beşiktaş Escort Sizlerle

Zevk Veren Esmer İstanbul Beşiktaş Escort Sizlerle reklamda oynamadan once unlu olmasi pek de onemli degildir. oynayan herkes daha sonra unlu olmu$tur.ilac, deterjan ve kozmetik urunlerinin uretim ve pazarlamasini yapan bir $irket.. 1958 yilinda kurulmu$tur..bu işlem kupa denilen özel bir camla yapıldığı için kupa çekmek deyimi de kullanılırce$itli pizza hut pizzalari. Vaspasia-nonun kitap dükkanında defalarca konuşmuş olduğum, inanılmaz bir kitap koleksiyoncusu olan yaşlı Niccolo de Niccoli öldüğünde, Cosimo tüm dini kitapları, hatta belki daha da fazlasını bu manast takımlar dokuz kişilik olsun, herkes maçın başından sonuna kadar oynamak zorunda değil, kardeş kardeş, dönüşümlü olarak atılabilir imzalar gollere.*bozbaş...ığdır yöresinde yaşayan azerilerin yöresel yemeklerinden biri...muğla kebabına benzer, ayrıca nohut gibi garnitürler de katılır ve kurutulmuş lavaş ekmeği ile servis yapılır...korkunç yağlı olur ve ilk kez yiyenlerde ters tepki gösterir*...18 saatlik ankara-ığdır otobüs yolcuğunu (topu topu 3 mola) tek kelime ile işkenceye çevirir...(bkz: bozbaş)genç erkek keçi. from güvenlik elbiseleri

[jbpiggin]

Let's Keep Going

This is number 200 in a series of blog posts known as "Piggin's Unofficial Lists". The idea from the beginning was to pass on the news when I saw that some of the Vatican Library's most famous manuscripts had arrived online. There is no official list of weekly releases, so software help was needed for a mere user to detect changes in the published index of available manuscripts. @gundormr has kindly provide the software to pick the changes and I compare these with a hand-list of 2,500 notable manuscripts which I drew up. With time, there are naturally fewer unfound items on that list (currently down to 1,600), since most of the very old and the very famous manuscripts are by now already up on the web for the whole world to read. The librarians fast-forwarded their greatest treasures into the digitization process. My cancer is continuing its ravages (and so is the cut-poison-burn protocol used to fight it) and my health will soon undoubtedly decline to the point where Piggin's Unofficial Lists cannot go on. But not just yet please! We are still waiting for some notable Vatican releases including William of Moerbeke's holograph Latin translation of Archimedes, Ott.lat.1850, and the Vatican Beatus, Vat.lat.7621. And I have talks to deliver at the International Conference on the History of Cartography in Amsterdam in July and Die Tabula Peutingeriana: Aktuelle Forschungsansätze und neue Ergebnisse in Vienna in September. Four years ago, the first PUL issue, Is This the World's Oldest Bound Book? noted there were 1,626 manuscripts online by then. Today there are 17,413, more than ten times as many, but still only about one fifth of the amazing manuscript holdings at the Vatican. Sometimes, when I look through the releases now, it is a challenge to find any codex in the weekly crop that is worth describing in words of excitement. It is pleasing that @DigitaVaticana has been issuing more frequent #LatestDigitizedManuscripts tweets recently, but PUL will keep appearing for a while yet. Here is this week's list of 54 items:

Barb.gr.300,

Barb.gr.446,

Barb.gr.471,

Barb.gr.565.pt.1, lectionary (Evangelistarion) Gregory-Aland ℓ 134 of the 13th century, see Wikipedia 

Barb.gr.565.pt.2,

Barb.gr.579,

Barb.gr.593,

Barb.lat.33,

Borg.copt.109.fasc.24,

Ross.87,

Ross.237,

Urb.lat.563,

Urb.lat.606,

Urb.lat.619,

Urb.lat.905,

Urb.lat.967,

Urb.lat.1288,

Urb.lat.1464.pt.1,

Urb.lat.1481.pt.1,

Urb.lat.1481.pt.2,

Urb.lat.1515,

Urb.lat.1527,

Urb.lat.1535,

Urb.lat.1537,

Urb.lat.1594.pt.1,

Urb.lat.1651,

Urb.lat.1654,

Urb.lat.1658,

Vat.estr.or.57,

Vat.lat.2485,

Vat.lat.2490,

Vat.lat.3364, a book of draft papal letters scribed (and full of scratchings and amendments) by papal secretary Pietro Bembo: Epistulae nomine Leonis X scriptae (letters written for Leo X), When this was shown in the Rome Reborn exhibition, Anthony Grafton noted: "Bembo's autograph letters ... provide a good sample of "chancery italic," a script developed by Roman humanists in the late fifteenth century from the humanist cursive minuscule invented by the Florentine humanist Niccolo Niccoli in the 1420s." Today's lovely typeface Bembo is named after Pietro, but not because of his handwriting. Rather, the typographers' inspiration was a book of Pietro Bembo's verse in a font cut in 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius.

Vat.lat.4046,

Vat.lat.4186,

Vat.lat.4192 (Upgraded to HQ),

Vat.lat.4194,

Vat.lat.4472 (Upgraded to HQ),

Vat.lat.4591, see also in Jordanus

New @DigitaVaticana: Walter Burley's Expositio on Aristotle's Physica (version II). "Completus est iste liber per me fratrem Gabrielem de Papia", anno Domini 1411.https://t.co/7RUDc9khqUhttps://t.co/Nslkq8IXIg pic.twitter.com/G0o8oi3wme

— Pieter Beullens (@LatinAristotle) March 14, 2019

Vat.lat.4592, Ptolemaic astromical tables for emperor Frederick III, see Jordanus 

Vat.lat.4635,

Vat.lat.4648 (Upgraded to HQ),

Vat.lat.4656,

Vat.lat.4657,

Vat.lat.4664,

Vat.lat.4670,

Vat.lat.4675,

Vat.lat.4676,

Vat.lat.4687,

Vat.lat.4690,

Vat.lat.4692,

Vat.lat.4704,

Vat.lat.5604,

Vat.lat.13488.pt.2,

Vat.lat.14740,

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 200. Thanks to @gundormr for harvesting. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2HBSedg

[ells-collective]

The Book (Part 2)

Gradually, what are now called endpapers evolved into a distinct (and often distinctive) component of the book. Endpapers are any leaves at the front and back of a book that are pasted to the inside of the boards; in some books, such as the St Cuthbert Gospel, there are no more than first and last of the regular leaves in the text block; in others, the text block was arranged so that its first and last gatherings comprised only a single folio each, which then formed the endpapers; and later, as bookmakers sough to streamline their craft, loose endpapers were simply pasted directly to the inside of the boards and their facing pages. Endpapers have always served a practical purpose in anchoring the text block to the cover, and when marbled papers, decorated with swirls of colour, became available in the seventeenth century, they became a way for bookbinders to inject some personality into their products. 

Similarly, the band of coloured thread at the top of a hardback’s spine was a practical feature before it became an ornamental one. In Coptic-bound books, the “headband” was a straightforward affair, made by piercing holes near the top of each gathering and stitching them through the leather of the cover. In some cases, end bands were recessed into notches cut into the text block so they sat flush with the top and bottom of the spine. The most cited reason for the presence of a headband is that it helps protect a book’s spine as it s removed from the shelf. It is a neat explanation but it is misleading. They were, simply, integral parts of a book’s binding, an evolutionary midpoint between the chain stitching of Coptic bindings and the sewn cords of later books that help keep boards, gatherings and leather in one piece. 

Firstly, each of the single sheets in  book, folded in half and attached to the spine, is called a folio, from the latin folium, or leaf. Secondly, the two halves of each folded folio are known as leaves, though for bookbinders, collectors and codiocologists the distinction between “folio” and “leaf” is an old and robust one. Finally, each of the two sides of a leaf is a single page. As a mnemonic, consider that you leaf through a book, turning over leaves as you go, on the way to find a particular page. 

First, he (William Hancock) said, having printed, folded, collated, and trimmed a book’s gatherings, but before they had been sewn together, they were to be locked in a lying press as if ready to be rounded and backed. Next, the spine of the text block was shorn clean off with a plough of guillotine, removing the folds between the pages, and then roughened with sandpaper. Over the course of a day or two, a series of coats of “caoutchouc” or rubber, dissolved in a solution of turpentine, were painted over the spine so that they seeped into the microscopic crevices between the pages and bound the whole thing together as they dried. The spine was finished with a strip of cloth stuck to the final coat of caoutchouc and the completed text block was pasted into a separate cover or case, by its endpapers. This produced books that, in Hancock’s words, open perfectly flat or more nearly so than books bound by any other method. “case-binding” 

Today’s characteristic paperback binding, where a book’s spine is trimmed, roughened, glued and pressed into a single-ply cover, is known as “perfect binding”.

Each row of chain stitches crosses the spine from front board to the back, the thread passing in and out of each gathering in turn, and creating characteristic rows of plaited thread as it goes. In this way, each of the components of the finished book - the front board, each of the gatherings, and the back board - was sewn only to its neighbouring components. The front board was sewn to the first gathering, the first to the second gathering, and so on. The product was a book that opened entirely flat: the stitching between gatherings acted as a flexible hinge, allowing each gathering to be opened without competing against all the others. It was a small innovation but a crucial one, and today this style of binding is called Coptic stitching in honour of the Egyptian Copts who pioneered it between the second and fourth centuries CE. 

Of late, a slanting, graceful variant of roman script had become fashionable among certain scholars, and Manutius directed Griffo to cut a new typeface based on the handwriting of Niccolo de Niccoli, one of the most accomplished practitioners. Aldus’ contemporaries called the new typeface “Aldino” after the printer who pioneered it, but today we call it “italic” after its Italian origins. It was both more flamboyant and more compact than its roman equivalent, and so, apparently unwilling to dilute the impact of this new typeface, Aldus set his Virgil in italics in its entirety, with the sole exception of the Capitals that Introduced Each Line in difference to Niccolo de Niccoli’s preference for doing so. 

Aldus was a ruthless editor. Whether they had been written or printed, Renaissance editions of classical works were invariably suffocated by reams of commentary. Aldus, on the other hand, printed only the unadulterated words of Virgil himself, creating a sparse, clean book whose lack of visual frippery let the content do the talking. There was a single introductory page, then the text itself, and finally a colophon or explanatory note, describing the genesis of the book. Chapters began on new pages and each page was given over entirely to the text at hand. 

Finally in 1995, America’s de facto standards board, the nonprofit American National Standards Institute, ratified the standard 8.5-by-11 inch sheet as the starting point for a hierarchical series of paper sizes, Re-christianed as ANSI A, letter paper is doubled in size to yield ANSI B or ledger paper. doubled again to make ANSI C and so on. It may lack the geometric elegance of Europe’s A series, but the American system is here to stay: the pages of this book are half the size of a sheet of letter paper; its folios are letter paper-sized and the ANSI C octavo quires from which they are folded are four times larger again. 

Colophon - a place for the printer to record the details of the book’s manufacture, the name of its firm; its coat of arms, perhaps; and the place and date of its production. 

[marchesamedici]

These are the precursors to modern day script. On the left is the Roman type typically used today in fonts like Times New Roman. On the right is the precursor to the modern day Italic type. Amazingly enough, these two scripts were written by contemporaries in the Italian Renaissance by two Florentines.

On the left is the writing by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), famous for his journey around monasteries in Northern Europe in search of manuscripts which he then sent to his friend Niccolo Niccoli (1364-1437) in Florence. 

Niccolo Niccoli copied these manuscripts in his neat cursive and displayed in the library. He then opened the library up to any and all scholars who wished to peruse these manuscripts free of charge. He was eventually bankrupted by his hobby and left his library to the Medici family upon his death.

Bracciolini is credited with discovering the last surviving copy of Lucretius in a German monastery and thus initiating the rediscovery of atomism that is fundamental to our understanding of science today.

[lovelyhandwrittennotes]

Handwritten from Hawaii

I recently received this lovely card from Doug in Hawaii.  He was responding to the past Question of the Week: If you could receive a handwritten letter from anyone throughout history, who would it be?  Why, and what do you think they would tell you?  What would their letter be like?

I have received some truly wonderful responses to this particular Question of the Week, and Doug's was one of them.

19 May 2012

I think the historical figure I would most like to receive a handwritten letter from would be Niccolo Niccoli, the early 15th century Florentine scholar who invented the form of handwriting I am trying to emulate here.  That would be "italic" or Italian Humanistic Cursive.  Using elements from ancient Carolingian and contemporary cursive, he created a form that was legible and quick in order to accommodate the demand for transcripts of classical texts.  Note that this was the era directly preceding the developments and proliferation of books via mechanical replication from a printing press.  It was the handwriting of the geniuses of the Renaissance!  Wouldn't a letter from Niccolo really be something?

Doug

From the moment I opened up Doug's letter, I was smiling over its incredible penmanship!  I love its hurried, yet elegant shape.

What a great response to this question!  I can only imagine how beautiful Niccolo's lettering would be.  

Thank you so much for sharing this art with us, Doug, and for the mini history lesson!