Lancelot, Petrarch and the Decameron, Three Antique Prints, 1849

A set of three original antique chromolithographs of specimens from the most famous books of the Middle Ages, sold together and not separately. All three are calligraphed by A. Racinet and printed by Lemercier for Lacroix and Sere's Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance, Paris, 1849, and each gives two or four panels of text copied letter for letter from a named manuscript in the Bibliotheque nationale de Paris or the royal library at Munich, with the sources lettered beneath and the painted initials and borders reproduced in full color. They are three original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split.

One sheet sets four famous books side by side: Lancelot du Lac written out in 1274, a fifteenth century Portuguese Chronicle of Guinea, the Decameron of Boccaccio in a sixteenth century Italian hand, and the Homilies of Saint Augustine written in Irish in the eighth century. A second contrasts the cramped Gothic of the thirteenth century Bible of Saint Louis with the open humanist page of a fifteenth century Petrarch, framed in blue and gold spraywork. The third gives a sixteenth century book of Chants Royaux and the romance of Olivier de Castille in the heavy formal script the French trade called lettres de forme, the hand the first printers cut their types to imitate.

Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance was issued in Paris between 1848 and 1851 in five volumes under the literary direction of Paul Lacroix and the artistic direction of Ferdinand Sere. This plate belongs to the second volume, dated 1849. Its chromolithographs were drawn from the originals by artists sent into the libraries and collections of France, Belgium and Germany, and printed by Lemercier of Paris or by Engelmann et Graf. Between them these three sheets name Lancelot du Lac, the Decameron of Boccaccio, the Bible of Saint Louis, the Poems of Petrarch, the Homilies of Saint Augustine in Irish and the Portuguese Chronicle of Guinea, which is an unusual concentration of celebrated texts for three frames. They share size, upright format, hand and printer. Hung as a group of three in a library they are the sort of thing a visitor stops in front of and starts reading.

Even age toning throughout. Marked handling soiling along the edges of all three sheets. Scattered foxing in the margins of all three sheets. Slight wear at the corners of two of the three sheets.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. This item is sold unframed.