![]() Manuscript production in Siena was limited primarily to the commissioning of liturgical choir-books for the cathedral, the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, and the most important monastic churches. The famous bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498) led a thriving enterprise that helped build some of the most impressive private libraries in Renaissance Italy, such as those of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro in Urbino, and King Ferdinand I of Aragon in Naples. ![]() The production of humanist manuscripts in Florence centered around the busy workshops of booksellers ( cartolai), who entrusted the decoration of their volumes to outside painters and professional illuminators. In the middle of the fifteenth century, Fra Angelico’s closest follower, Zanobi Strozzi (King David in Prayer in an Initial B: Cutting from a Psalter, 19), was among the many painters and professional illuminators engaged by the Medici and other important Florentine families to decorate both liturgical and secular texts in the newest Renaissance style of painting. The leading painter in Florence during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Monaco, headed a large scriptorium in the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where he was involved in the decoration of one of the most celebrated series of choir-books ever produced in Italy (Last Judgment in an Initial C: Cutting from an Antiphonary, 19). Many of the famous artists who painted altarpieces and frescoes in fifteenth-century Tuscany were also involved in the decoration of choir-books for the most important churches and monasteries. During the early Renaissance, the art of manuscript illumination flourished in Italy, alongside that of painting, with the formation of regional schools and centers of production.
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