Journey through the Dante Urbinate: the fame

You may not know that among the thousands of volumes in the Vatican Library, the Dante Urbinate has been chosen to be shown to distinguished visitors, because of its extraordinary beauty.

The critical history of the manuscript, surprisingly, only begins in the nineteenth century, when the volume was cited several times in the six-volume History of Art by the French archeologist and historian Jean Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, published posthumously in 1823. Since then, interest has grown in the “Urbinate latino 365.”

There are dozens of research papers focussing mainly on the attribution of the miniatures. These have seen progressive stages of new information and interpretations, by way of presumed discoveries and debates about them, that continue up to the present day. All of this is covered in the commentary "La Divina Commedia di Federico da Montefeltro. Il Dante Urbinate. Commentario".


Source: La Divina Commedia di Federico da Montefeltro. Il Dante Urbinate. Commentario. 

Illumination from Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, Ms. Urb. lat. 365, f. 28r, 1478-1482, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

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