WRITTEN IN FRENCH
Humanist culture profoundly renewed the relationship to knowledge in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Starting from the founding figure of Petrarch, a scholar of a new kind who advocated the study of ancient texts with an ethical aim, this catalogue seeks to show how this ideal is concretized through the collection of manuscripts by classical authors of Antiquity and their transmission, through copies and translations.
This literary culture was complemented by a visual culture nourished by an infatuation with Antiquity and aimed to magnify the text by developing a new decorative vocabulary, both in illuminated manuscripts and in bindings (architectural decorations in the antique style, medal motifs copied from antique medals, triumphal arch decorations, etc.). It also led to a new art of portraiture, taking up the humanist theme of the "great man" and illustrating the faith in the moral perfectibility of the individual through education and belles lettres.
Finally, this humanist model gives a new lustre to the institution that is the library, which is itself called upon to be both the place where this knowledge gathers and the place where it appears in all its glory, thus fulfilling a practical and a symbolic function.
Exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France from 20 February to 16 June 2024
French
264 pages / 160 illustrations
Éditions BnF
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