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Renaissance Book Collecting
Hugh Pagan, 01 April 2001 - [ E-mail a Friend ]
ANTHONY HOBSON, Renaissance book collecting. Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their books and bindings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1999. xix + (1) + 275 + (1)pp, including 86 photo ills. Publisher's cloth. £75.
The subject matter of Anthony Hobson's present book may already be familiar to an inner circle of students of the history of book collecting, for it is based on the Lyell Lectures delivered by him at Oxford University as far back now as 1991, but its appearance in print is nonetheless a landmark event. In choosing to discuss Jean Grolier (c.1489-1565), celebrated for some four centuries among book collectors and students of the history of bookbinding, alongside Grolier's younger and less familiar Spanish contemporary, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (c.1503-1575), Anthony Hobson has, almost for the first time, put Grolier studies in their proper perspective; as part of the wider history of the collecting of books and manuscripts in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Those parts of Hobson's book which are devoted to the respective roles of Grolier and of Hurtado de Mendoza as patrons of bookbinding are based on Hobson's profound knowledge of the surviving bindings done for Grolier in Paris and Milan and for Hurtado de Mendoza in Venice, and will not easily be bettered. Attached appendices record: "Grolier's bindings classified by workshop" (an edited version of a list compiled by the late Howard Nixon); "Bindings by the Mendoza Binder (Andrea di Lorenzo) "; "Bindings by the Cicero Binder"; "Bindings by the Fugger Binder"; "Venetian Bindings by Anthoni Lodewijk"; "Bindings by the Agnese Binder (Bartolomeo di Giovanni da Fino?)"; and "Bindings by the Emblematic Binder". These place at the disposal of any present or future researcher all the key elements in the evidence that Hobson has so carefully collected, and it is reasonable to suppose that any so far unrecorded examples of bindings of this character will fall neatly into one or other of the categories into which Hobson has divided them.
What, however, emerges most clearly from Hobson's book (and perhaps even more clearly to the reader than to Hobson himself) is that Grolier's final library, of which we know most, was only, to quote Hobson, "what the French call "un cabinet de livres", a select collection, with no claim to cover every discipline", and that the range of titles that it contained was not in fact particularly interesting. Although Hobson is able to point to Grolier's interest in Latin and neo-Latin literature, history and antiquities, he also rightly records that Grolier's "literary culture, based on Latin, was old-fashioned" and that Grolier "played no part in the sixteenth-century development of Greek studies or vernacular literature". Likewise, Grolier was not interested in the sciences and, surprisingly, not especially keen on illustrated books of any kind.
Viewed thus, Grolier's library pales into insignificance besides the truly remarkable library formed in a ten-year period between the late 1530s and the late 1540s by the Spanish diplomat Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. In these years hew was successively Ambassador to the Republic of Venice, Imperial Representative at the Council of Trent, and Ambassador to the Pope. Hurtado de Mendoza possessed, as a contemporary recorded, the will, ability, and diligent application necessary to carry through any great enterprise, and during his years in Italy he put together a superb library. By the time of his death it included at least 256 manuscripts in Greek, 270 in Latin, 255 in Arabic and 43 in Hebrew, and at least 1200 printed books. In addition to remarkable holdings of Aristotle and Plato, the library was rich in theology, science and mathematics, and there is ample contemporary testimony to Hurtado de Mendoza's intellectual interests and to his chutzpah in making acquisitions, which even involved him obtaining six boxes of manuscripts from the Sultan at Constantinople in part exchange for the ransom of a Turkish prisoner of war.
Regrettably, the growing impact of the Inquisition on Spanish cultural life meant that after Hurtado de Mendoza's recall to Spain his library was submitted to censorship. When the library passed to the Spanish Crown after Hurtado de Mendoza's death, the books were kept in the Royal Library at the Escurial and could not easily be consulted by the scholars and intellectuals for whose use they had been collected. It is only today that the research of Hobson and others has revealed how much of the library survives on the shelves of the Escurial and how great a book collector Don Diego was.
Anthony Hobson D.Litt. FBA is a noted expert on bibliography whose appointments have included Sanders reader in bibliography, Univ. of Cambridge 1974-75, Franklin Jasper Wells lectr. Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, 1979 (hon.fell. 1983-), Rosenbach lect. Univ. of Pennsylvania 1990, Lyell reader in bibliography Univ. of Oxford 1990-1991. He has held since 1985 the office of president of the Assoc. Internationale Bibliophilie; and was president of the Bibliographical Society from 1977-79, being awarded their gold medal in 1992.
Other books written by Anthiny Hobson are French and Italian Collectors and their Bindings (1953), Great Libraries (1970), Apollo and Pegasus(1975) and Humanists and Bookbinders(1989).