Francesco Lovino. Oltre Bisanzio: Le illustrazioni dei manoscritti italogreci della Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia. FrancoAngeli, 2024.

From FrancoAngeli

The volume investigates the ornamental decorations and illustrations of six manuscripts from southern Italy and Sicily, today preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, the fruit of Cardinal Bessarione’s gift to the city quasi alterum Byzantium, and thus the only one worthy of preserving the memory of Byzantine culture after the traumatic fall of Constantinople in 1453. From the encounter between Greek and Benedictine monasticism in Calabria, Campania, and Latium in the 10th and 11th centuries to the Palermo of Roger II and the political use of Byzantine art, up to the Hellenophone resistance in the Angevin Salento of the late 13th century, the history of the ornamentation of italo-greek manuscripts becomes a reflection of the cultural history of the Greek communities in southern Italy and Sicily throughout the Middle Ages.