La linea pesarese : sulla committenza libraria di Battista Sforza e Federico da Montefeltro

The Pesaro line. On the Book Commission of Battista Sforza and Federico da MontefeltroThe contribution analyzes a group of illuminated manuscripts from the library of Federico da Montefeltro (now preserved in the Urbinate collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana) largely signed by Federico Veterani, copyist and librarian of the Urbino library. As suggested by Silvia Fumian for the mss. Urb. lat. 419 and 420, these could be falsifying subscriptions in which Veterani attributes to himself the activity of copyist and illuminator of those books. In the decorative apparatus of these manuscripts it is possible to identify some emblems – which flank the coats of arms and enterprises of the Montefeltro family – perhaps attributable to the Sforza of Pesaro.

The two manuscripts cited can be associated with an adequate number of codices of classical texts, mostly united by Federico Veterani's subscriptions and a figurative culture attributable to the Pesaro area (in particular to the illuminationsactive for the Sforza of Pesaro). The resulting historiographic problem concerns the commissioning of these manuscripts and the role played by Battista Sforza from Pesaro, the second wife of Federico da Montefeltro, in the constitution of a scriptorium in Urbino before 1472. The large number of illuminated manuscripts for Federico, witnesses a Pesaro-Sforza figurative culture thickens the plot of active illuminators for the Federician library in which they have been extensively unraveled from the historiography the well-known figurative lines of the Florentine school, the Ferrara one and the Po Valley one. [Publisher's text]