ABSTRACT
If Paris 54 was likely created in connection with thirteenth-century efforts to reunite the Latin and Orthodox Churches, it may well have been brought to the West in conjunction with similar efforts in the fifteenth century.2 This is in reference to the Florence-Ferrara Council of 1438-39,3 but the foundations for this meeting had long been in the making through the initiatives of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (r. 1391-1425) and those working on his behalf, such as Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355-1415).4 I will not provide a detailed picture of the growth of humanism in Florence from Petrarch through Lorenzo de Medici, but I would like to sketch a few scenarios by which a manuscript such as Paris 54 might have found its way to Florence and eventually to Paris. In Chapter 1, we noted that Paris 54 can be associated directly with three collectors with Florentine (and Medici) roots, including Niccolò Ridolfi (d. 1551), a nephew of Pope Leo X (Giovanni de Medici, d. 1521), and Pietro Strozzi (d. 1558), a relative of Palla Strozzi, and a Medici
1 Alberti, the famous fifteenth-century author and architect, voices his frustrations with his copy of Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture. Vitruvius was a contemporary of the Emperor Augustus. See Leon Battista Alberti, On Architecture (1452), Book VI, chap. 1, Giacomo Leoni, The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, 1st edn. (London, 1726), transl. in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., A Documentary History of Art, vol. 1: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books and Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 227-8.
