Guglielmo Giraldi

(doc. in Ferrara between 1441 and 1494)

Bible of San Cristoforo alla Certosa, c. 1467-75

Membranaceous, 4 vols.

Museo Schifanoia, invv. OA 1346, 1347, 1348, 1349

The monumental four-volume Bible from the Carthusian monastery of San Cristoforo is one of the masterpieces of Ferrara Renaissance illumination. The transcription of the Bible was entrusted to the professed monk Matthew of Alexandria, who began the work around 1467 and concluded it shortly after 1475. The hypothetical dating is fully in keeping with the stylistic attribution of the entire decorative apparatus to Gugliemo Giraldi and his workshop, who completed the task well after the death of the client. If in the third and fourth volumes, still richly illuminated but smaller and far less figured, it is difficult to identify the hand of a single maker, in the second, and even more so in the first, Giraldi’s overall direction and autography are indisputable. In the latter codex, which inaugurates the biblical cycle and contains the prologues of St. Jerome in addition to the seven books prescribed in Lent by the Carthusian order (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges and Ruth), critics are in fact now in agreement in recognizing the sole hand of the master who, in his now mature style, hints at the close ties with what was being accomplished in Ferrara in those same years, both in sculpture and painting.