great bindings from the spanish royal collections
DESCRIPTION
The exhibition that this book accompanied, took place in April 2012, bringing together two hundred and fifty bound volumes selected from Spain's National Heritage collections, making up an exceptional and unrepeatable exhibition of these astonishing works of art. These are works that were created for the monarch's own use, beginning in the days of Charles V and Philip II, offering us a marvellous insight into the Royal Libraries of the House of Hapsburg and the House of Bourbon. We also come across items from a number of extraordinary complete collections that were treasured by conspicuous patrons and ending up by enriching the King's library, thus endowing the Crown with the enormous intellectual prestige enjoyed by their owners for having gathered together such works.TRANSCRIPT
Great Bindings from the
Spanish Royal Collections15th – 21st centuries
This book brings together the most select pieces from the Hapsburg
and Bourbon collections from the fi fteenth to the twenty-fi rst cen-
turies, which are analysed from different perspectives by the most
prestigious international experts on the art of bookbinding.
It deals with aspects ranging from the complex relations between
Francis I of France and Charles V, which are the context for a group
of French bindings held at El Escorial; the varied commissions of
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who gave the contents of his library to
Philip II; and the structure of limp parchment bindings and their
production process, which provide useful information for studying
the circulation of books in Europe; to bindings executed by known
typographers such as Plantin and Bodoni; and, fi nally, the serial but
distinctive bindings on the books in the Real Biblioteca that were
created by royal bookbinders as part of the effort to shape a national
historical image for the king. All this is accompanied by more than
two hundred colour illustrations and a complete thematic bibliogra-
phy on bookbinding in Spain.
E D I C I O N E S E L V I S O
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153D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
Fig . 96
Volumes bound in Paris in the early 1540s with gilt titles on the spine, preserved in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial
Fig . 97
Guillaume Budé, Libri V de Asse. Venetiis: in aedibus Aldi, et Andreae Asulani soceri, 1522. Bound in dark blue morocco. RBME, 177.IV.14
157D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
100 101
9998
158 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T A N D P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
159D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
A Gift, from Whom and for Whom?
If the peculiarity common to these bindings—
the title gilded on the spine—necessarily points
to the court of Francis I as the source of this
order to the binders, the precise details of it
remain unknown. It is extremely difficult to
extrapolate from the printing dates of the
volumes, since it is probable that these eigh-
teen bindings represent only a part of a group
that must have been considerably larger. The
publication date of 1540 of several of the vol-
umes rules out the idea that they were sent
to Charles V after his journey through France.
The gift is more likely to have been made in
the following months, in 1540, 1541 or at the
beginning of 1542 (as stated above, war would
be officially declared on 12 July 1542).
The volumes have no armorial bearings,
nor do they figure in any of the published
inventories of the Spanish royal libraries.8
Were they sent to Charles V personally? The
choice of authors (Erasmus, Cicero, Latin poets
Figs. 102 and 103
Angelo Poliziano, Opera .... Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1536–37, 3 tomes in 2 vols. Bound in white sheepskin with different gold ornamentation on each volume. RBME, 37.VI.31–32
Fig . 104
Thomas Aquinas, Principis ac sacre scripture sinceri interp[re]tis Commentarij in Soliloq[ui]a, sive hymnos davidicos .... Lugdu[ni]: In edibus Jacobi myt: impensis Jacobi q. Fra[n]scici de giu[n]ta et sociorum fl orentinoru[m], 1520. Bound in calfskin originally painted black. RBME, 177.V.11
160 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T Y P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
Fig . 105
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutionum oratoriarum libri XII. Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1536. Bound in bronze green morocco. RBME, 80.IV.1
Fig . 106
Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae. Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1534. Bound in bronze green morocco. RBME, 56.IV.22
Fig . 107
Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis libri II; Saturnaliorum libri VII. Excud. Lugd.: Seb. Gryphius Germ., 1532. Bound in bronze green morocco. RBME, 56.IV.23
Fig . 108
Marcus Tullius Cicero, M. Tullij Ciceronis Rhetoricorum libri quatuor ad Herennium. Parisiis: ex offi cina Simonis Colinaei, 1539. Bound in bronze green morocco. RBME, 80.IV.5
Fig . 109
Guillaume Budé, Annotationes Gulielmi Budaei ... in quatuor & viginti Pandectarum libros...: per autore[m] diligentissime recognitae & auctae. Basileae: apud Thomam Volffi um, 1534. Bound in citron morocco. RBME, 74.IV.10
Fig . 110
Decius Junius Juvenal, Satyrae iam recens recognitae, simul ac adnotatiunculis, quae breuis commentarij uice esse possint, illustratae. Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1538; Iacopo Sannazaro, Opera omnia .... Lugduni: apud Seb. Gryphium, 1536. Bound in brown morocco. RBME, 17.V.1
161D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
106 107
109 110
165T H R E E A S P E C T S O F F R E N C H B I N D I N G S I N T H E S P A N I S H N A T I O N A L H E R I T A G E C O L L E C T I O N S
172 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T Y P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
173D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
176 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T Y P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
180 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T Y P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
Here we set out our objections to the
conclusions of Colin and Nixon. Some forty
volumes in their list certainly constitute a
very homogenous group (Antwerp printings,
Spanish authors, Spanish dedicatees or own-
ers, similar decorative style), but the presence
of others is harder to explain, or cannot be
explained at all. The binding most evidently
foreign to this homogenous group is the one
that bears the device and emblems of Henry
II, preserved in Oxford (CN 41).25
It covers a book of hours printed in 1549
by Regnauld and Claude Chaudière. It is
unprecedented and furthermore totally improb-
able that a book printed in Paris and meant
for Henry II should have been sent abroad
to be bound. And even more unlikely in view
of the absolute evidence that the copy was
presented to the king by Chaudière. The
elegant and skilfully designed decoration
includes two wide bows and an emblem; it
also bears eight stamps of the small Cupid’s
Fig . 123Flavius Josephus, Los siete libros de Flauio Iosefo los quales contienen las guerras de los Iudios, y la destrucion de Hierusalem y d’el templo / traduzidos agora nueua-mente segun la verdad de la historia por Iuan Martin Cor-dero .... En Anuers: en casa de Martin Nucio ..., 1557. Binding with the painted royal coat of arms. RBME, 33.V.17
Fig . 122Ivo, bishop of Chartres, Pannormia, seu Decretum, D. Iuo-nis Carnothensis episcopi restitutu[m], correctum, & emen-datum / opera & diligentia Melchioris à Vosmediano .... Louanii: ex officina Antonij Maria Bergagne ..., 1557. RBME, 25.VI.20
Fig . 124Tommaso Fazello, De rebus Siculis decades duae .... Pan-ormi: ex officina Ioannis Matthaei Maydae, 1558. Bound in green and red morocco. RBME, 60.IX.13
183D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S
Fig. 125 Pedro Alfonso de Burgos, Dialogi de immortali-tate animae .... Barcinone: apud Claudium Bornat, 1561. French “spineless” binding. RBME, 6.V.54
tomer) when he executed, on a copy of the
Viaje probably intended for Pérez [fig. 118],
a highly ingenious semé pattern on two small,
very elegant stamps, one of which also adorns
the Ode.
In 1557 and 1558, in a dramatic turn of
events, the Antwerp workshop produced six
remarkable bindings (our group C) whose
decoration featured two Parisian tools employed
on the “Plantin” bindings in group A, as well
as some new tools that formed part of the
Cupid’s Bow bindery. These bindings, deco-
rated by a competent gilder, were not taken
into account by Colin and Nixon.26 On the
other hand, they did study two bindings (on
Plantin printings) executed nearly forty years
later, on which the decoration includes some
tools from the same sources. Nixon very cor-
rectly concluded that the Parisian Cupid’s
Bow workshop had ceased to exist, probably
in 1556, and that part of its tools had turned
up in Antwerp.
For our part we are convinced that the
six uncatalogued bindings in the Escorial were
executed in an Antwerp workshop belonging
to Plantin or patronised by him.
We end this section with an extraordinary
binding, without a cover on the spine, which
is certainly Parisian and which covers the
dedication copy to Philip II of a work printed
in Barcelona in 1561 by Claude Bornat (Alfon-
sus, Dialogi de immortalitate animae, Barce-
lona, 1561) [fig. 125].
Only four sixteenth-century French bind-
ings with uncovered spines had appeared
until now, all made for a corpus such as the
one in the Escorial. At first we thought that
Plantin could have served as intermediary
for the commissioning of this binding in
Paris, but it was more probably Claude Bornat
who himself took charge of it, since in 1564
the dedication copy to Philip II of another
work published by him, in a Spanish binding
on this occasion, is half-decorated with the
same very elegant stamp-impressed design.
186 I S A B E L L E D E C O N I H O U T Y P A S C A L R A C T - M A D O U X
Fig . 126Almanach Royal. Á Paris: De l’Imprimerie de la Veuve d’Houry, au Saint-Esprit, 1749–58. Bindings by Pierre-Paul Dubuisson. RB, PAS/ARM3/44–53
187D O S M O M E N T O S D E L A E N C U A D E R N A C I Ó N F R A N C E S A E N L A S C O L E C C I O N E S P A T R I M O N I A L E S