Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

- Blurb -

Now back in print, "the ultimate book-lover' s gift book" (Los Angeles Times)In 1561-62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay (died 1575), imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) as a demonstration of his own preeminence among scribes. Some thirty years later, Ferdinand' s grandson, the Emperor Rudolf II, commissioned Europe' s last great manuscript illuminator, Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600), to embellish the work. The resulting book is at once a treasury of extraordinary beauty and a landmark in the cultural debate between word and image. Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historical scripts for a work that summarized all that had been learned about writing to date-a testament to the universal power of the written word. Hoefnagel, desiring to prove the superiority of his art over Bocskay' s words, employed every resource of illusionism, color, and form to devise all manner of brilliant grotesques, from flowers, fruit, insects, and animals to monsters and masks.