Medallion and plaquette ornament on bindings had been conceived by Paduan antiquaries in the 1460s, as a style of binding appropriate for humanistic works. The models were Roman imperial coins, antique intaglios, and Renaissance medals, and the decoration was achieved by impressing the covers with an intaglio stamp, leaving an impression in relief. In Anthony Hobson’s words, such decoration “denoted an author’s or an owner’s faithfulness to the spirit of the ancient world”. Infrequently, a cameo was applied to a binding to proclaim ownership (such bindings were therefore excluded from Hobson’s census of medallion and plaquette bindings).1 Six bindings are known which feature on both covers the distinctive heraldic device of a Saracen in profile, wearing a white headband, insignia associated with the Pucci family of Florence (D’argento, alla testa di moro di nero, attortigliata del primo, il tortiglio in genere caricato di tre).
Left Detail from no. 6. Right Detail from no. 3
The six bindings (see List below) cover books published by the Aldine Press from 1517 to 1523, and their uniformity suggests that they were executed on a single commission. Most (possibly all) have a title lettered on the tail-edge. None retains a recognisable inscription or other evidence of Pucci family ownership. Pandolfo Pucci (d. 1560) is known to have collected a library of classical texts, which was coveted by Cosimo I de’ Medici. Two of the recorded “Pucci bindings” cover editions of Cicero, and an inventory of the Pucci family library, made in October 1575, apparently “lists several volumes of Cicero, an author more completely represented in the Pucci collection than any other ancient writer”.2 A binding in vellum with the painted arms of Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci (1458-1531) is also known.3
Tools of foliage entwined with a stem or trunk, repeated to create a border, are typically Venetian. De Marinis localised the Pucci bindings in the British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum to Venice, and also the binding on a 1515 Giunta Aphthonius, which displays another version of the stem-and-foliage tool in conjunction with a medallion of Nero (British Library, Henry Davis 737 [link]). Anthony Hobson4 and Mirjam Foot5 both assigned the Aphthonius to “Padua or Venice, c. 1530”, however Foot considered the Pucci binding “probably made in Florence, c. 1525”. Federico Macchi localised both the British Library’s Pucci binding and the Aphthonius to “Bologna, 1525-1550” (British Library Database of Bookbindings).
Detail from upper cover of no. 2
1. A. Hobson, Humanists and bookbinders: the origins and diffusion of the humanistic bookbinding, 1459-1559 (Cambridge 1989), p.214 (“… Nor does it include the armorial devices in relief of the Pucci family…”).
2. Carla Adella D’Arista, Building blocks of power: The Architectural commissions and decorative projects of the Pucci family in the Renaissance, Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 2017, pp.177, 313, 386 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane 341, Serie I, c. 90-93).
3. Modena, Biblioteca Estensi, Manoscritti Campori, Appendice 456 (Q. 5. 12.): Libro di Conti di dare e avere del Card. Lorenzo Pucci dell’anno 1513. Cf. Raimondo Vandini, Appendice prima al catalogo dei codici e manoscritti posseduti dal marchese Giuseppe Campori (Modena 1886), p.158 no. 456 (“Il volume è legato in pergamena con corregge di corame al dosso e l’arma del Cardinale miniata sul primo cartone.”). Giuseppe Fumagalli, L’arte della legatura alla corte degli Estensi (Florence 1913), no. 98 (“Ms cart., del sec. XVI. in fol. Legato in pergamena molle a forma di vacchetta, rinforzata da corregge di cuoio. Sul primo piatto, sono dipinte le armi dei Pucci di Firenze, cioè d'argento con testa di moro al naturale cinta da una fascia d’argento caricata da tre martelli, cimate del capello cardinalizio. Il card. Lorenzo Pucci (1458-1531) ebbe la porpora da Leone X appunto nel 1513”).
4. Hobson, op. cit., p.222, Census, no. 18b.
5. Mirjam Foot, The Henry Davis Gift: A Collection of bookbindings, Volume 3: A Catalogue of South-European bindings (London 2010), no. 284.
(1) Quintus Asconius Paedianus, Asconii Paediani Expositio in IIII orationes M. Tullii Cic. contra C. Verrem & in orationem pro Cornelio (Venice: Heirs of Aldo Manuzio & Andrea Torresano, December 1522)