The artist who painted the initials in this #Renaissance Italian manuscript (@subugoe Cod. MS philol. 116) painted this A upside down so that it now looks like a V. An A was added in the margin as a correction. Did the artist work upside-down, and if so, why?
Pre-modern books are great records of human error and therefore of historic working practices.
Fascinating.
If deliberate, was it an act of rebellion, of anarchic leanings?
Or a protest against the level of his (not her) 'honorarium'?
Or a challenge to see if the book were to have any readers? Ever?
Simple error seems more unlikely than any of the above?
@litteracarolina@subugoe@medievodons@histodons@historikerinnen
I guess, the pages were only much later bound into a book? Then, he might have worked upside down. For a right-handed artist, the hand wouldn't lie on the ink of the text but next to the parchment. Thus, the risk of leaving stains on the text is minimized... 🤔
This is the handwriting of renowned historian Theodor Mommsen @subugoe. I‘m a trained palaeographer and I can’t read it - not without spending a long time working out the individual letters. But native German speakers who have seen this type of writing before have much less trouble. Cursive #palaeography is all about exposure! @histodons@medievodons@historikerinnen
@subugoe@historikerinnen@histodons@medievodons My student has just discovered what looks like 18th-century censorship in this manuscript! The miniature of Yusuf and Zuleika having sex on their wedding night has been obscured by a carefully cut, glued and decorated piece of paper.
These are digital #microscope photos of a camel from a 15th-century Persian manuscript in the @subugoe (Cod. MS pers. 14). The purple image was taken with ultraviolet light and the grey picture with infrared. Because infrared goes right through most pigments, it reveals the preliminary sketch of the camel underneath the pigment (which you see in the UV photo). Really interesting for the history of art!