An Abecedarium: Illuminated Alphabets from the Court of Emperor Rudolf II (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)

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Description

Included within the magnificent pages of the Mira calligraphiae monumenta are two alphabets. Executed by an unknown hand, the primary consists of Roman capital letters; the other is Gothic lower-case letters. As with the calligraphy of Bocskay described above, these alphabets were embellished by Joris Hoefnagel, a painter on the court of Rudolf II. In embellishing the alphabets, Hoefnagel employed symbols and heraldic objects–masks, animals, plants, obelisks–to convey the power and greatness of the emperor.

An Abecedarium comprises the thirty-eight pages from the Mira codex that display Hoefnagel’s virtuosity in decorating the alphabets. Calligraphers, graphic artists, and all lovers of beautiful books will delight in Hoefnagel’s artistry.
Taken from a 16th-century manuscript now housed within the Getty Museum, the intricate illustrations on this tiny volume are characteristic of Renaissance art: each and every letter is surrounded by religious and political imagery, in addition to fanciful creatures and a fragment of a Psalm beginning with the respective letter. The nice and cozy, wealthy colors and the juxtaposition of elements such as crabs, asps, grapes, disembodied wings, crests, irises, and flags imbue each and every plate with a sense of divine haughtiness and humor. But even so the drawings themselves, the accompanying notes describe the evolution of different fonts, providing information that helps the reader interpret the wealth of information in each and every drawing.

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