Treasures from Italy's great libraries

A decade in the making, this volume presents in color a selection of the most important works from twelve of Italy's finest libraries, including the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican, the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence - the repository of the Medici collections - and Venice's Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

Among these masterpieces of the illuminator's and bookmaker's art, executed throughout Europe and spanning eleven centuries, are several fine Byzantine manuscripts, many splendid biblical and liturgical texts and a number of rare early printed books.

Highlights include such famous works as the Lorsch Gospels, the Hungarian Legendary, both parts of the Visconti Hours, Botticelli's illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy and a collection of songs with music produced for Lorenzo de Medici; while other subjects range from classical texts, chronicles and romances to books of astrology, herbals, legal and medical texts, maps, memoirs, military treatises and heraldry.