Illuminated Manuscripts in the ÖNB 1450-1475, Part 2

The most extensive fund of visual media to come down to us from the Middle Ages is contained within illuminated manuscripts. At the same time, this is also the treasure that art history has until now salvaged the least. The Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ÖNB) belongs to those half-dozen libraries worldwide with large holdings of high-quality illuminated manuscripts. It is thus on the same level as the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the National Libraries in Munich and Berlin. The proposed project is part of the academic cataloguisation of medieval illuminated manuscripts and incunabula which has been successfully carried out from Vienna for over a hundred years. Leading figures in this tradition of innovative ground-laying research have been Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909), Hermann Julius Hermann (1869-1953), Otto Pächt (1902-1988) and Gerhard Schmidt (1924-2010). The project phase 2010-2013 should see the substantial completion of the academic cataloguisation of those 375 manuscripts of Central European origins (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) from the period 1450-1475, for which extensive preparatory work has already been carried out in the course of the predecessor project. Shortened versions of the finished catalogue entries will in future be presented provisionally on the homepage of the ÖNB, along with relevant images. Focal points will be the oeuvre of the so-called Lehrbüchermeister, along with manuscripts with extensive pictorial programmes (mostly pen drawings; various text genres: world and council chronicles, Historienbibeln, fencing manuals, fable and armorial books, Speculum humanae salvationis, Jean de Mandeville`s Travels in the Holy Land, the Belial of Jacobus de Theramo, the Buch der Natur of Konrad von Megenberg, among others) and a broad layer of high-quality codices which should be placed in the context of monastic reform. Alongside this, account must increasingly be taken of forms of serial manuscript production (rationalisation and standardisation in production, use of graphics), which accompanied the spread of book printing and require their own cataloguing models.

Although book illumination in Central Europe in the third quarter of the fifteenth century had previously been treated only in isolated studies, the period is in fact of particular significance: the invention of the printing press produced an epochal impulse of cultural change, which can be better understood through comprehensive documentation and investigation of painted decoration in manuscripts and prints.The completed project continued the cataloguing of illuminated, Central European manuscripts from the Gothic period now in the Austrian National Library, an enterprise that began in 1990 and involves simultaneous investigation of Austrian monastic libraries. At the centre of the present project was manuscript production in Vienna, comprising around 100 codices. It has been possible to create a detailed picture of book production in the city in terms of the activity of cooperating workshops and scriptoria, and their interactions with patrons. A decisive role in Viennese book culture was played by the faculties, colleges, and halls of the university, in the environment of which courtly commissions were also realized.These findings have profited greatly from cooperation with simultaneous cataloguing projects dealing with illuminated incunabula in the National Library, incunabula at the Cistercian monastery Lilienfeld, illuminated manuscripts and incunabula of the Upper Austrian State Library in Linz (both FWF-projects based at the University of Vienna), and Bohemian manuscripts from the second half of the fifteenth century in the National Library (FWF-project based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences).Exchanges were also enabled by conferences, lectures, and exhibitions, particularly the exhibition series Masterpieces of Fifteenth-Century Illumination in Central Europe with 12 stations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and a larger conference in Vienna (2015-16) that represented the international state of research.