[Former classifications: N.178; E.5.2.54 ; 104]

The Palatino 313 is considered to be the oldest illuminated manuscript of the Comedy. It contains the three canticas of the Comedy as well as ample commentaries. The text of the Comedy is copied unto two columns without respect to the unity of the hendecasyllabic verse. Instead, the text is found to be fragmented over two or three lines. The commentary on Palatino 313, known as Chiose palatine, is disposed on two columns that frame the text (Abardo 2005). A detail in the Chiose allows us to date it before 1333, a little over ten years after Dante's death and the beginning of the circulation of Paradise.

The decoration, which depicts various episodes in the Commedia, is rich and abundant, but had not been completed for most of Purgatory and Paradise. As of now, the manuscript contains 37 vignettes depicting scenes from the tale, a few ornamented initials at the beginning of the cantos, and historiated initials marking the beginning of Inferno and Paradise. More recent additions, from the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, have filled in the blank spaces left for the introductory vignettes to Inferno and Purgatory. Interlinear annotations and glosses have been added subsequent to the completion of the book, as on f. 15v and 82r (Bertelli 2011, 376).

Its antiquity, its commentary, and its iconographic cycle make Palatino 313 one of the most significant and studied manuscripts of the Comedy. The use that has been made of this book over the centuries has had a significant impact on the printed editions of the work.

The manuscript belonged to Piero del Nero, a scholar and politician from Florence, deceased in 1598, who left a note of possession on the f. 1r, « Di Piero del Nero 1591 », legible with the use of Wood’s lamp (Bertelli 2011, 376). Del Nero placed his collection of manuscripts at the disposal of the Accademia della Crusca for the necessary examinations needed to produce the 1612 edition of the Italian language Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Enciclopedia Dantesca 1970). Del Nero owned at least fourteen manuscripts of the Comedy (including the Palatino 319), also used for the publication of the Accademia’s printed edition of this work. In 1800, the Guadagni, a Florentine family who had acquired the manuscript, sold it to Gaetano Poggiali (Bertelli 2011, 376), a Livornese editor who used it for the publication of his edition of the Comedy. The manuscript thereafter came into the possession of the Biblioteca Palatina Lorenese, founded in Florence by Ferdinand III of Tuscany in 1790 and merged in 1861 with the Biblioteca Magliabechiana, which later became the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence.

The Palatino 313 is not in an optimal state of preservation: several pages have been ruined by humidity; the text is not always legible; many illuminations are damaged; and some folios have been cut off.

Contents:

1. 1r-81v: Inferno;
2. 82r-159r: Purgatory;
3. 160r-326v: Paradise.

Digitization: https://archive.org/details/palatino-313-images/mode/2up

Manus File: https://manus.iccu.sbn.it/opac_SchedaScheda.php?ID=249997

Date: second quarter of the fourteenth century

Origin: Florence.

Physical description

Support: Parchment, paper guards.

Folios: V + 237 + III'.

Dimensions: 298 x 210 mm.

Quires: 1⁸, 2⁷, 3-9⁸, 10¹¹, 11-19⁸, 20⁶, 21⁸, 22¹⁰, 23⁶, 24-29⁸, 30⁵.

Script: littera textualis.

Binding: modern, wooden with a leather cover

Decoration: The very ambitious decorative project was not completed. The original plan outlined a narrative vignette and a decorated initial for each canto, with the initials for the terzine and for the commentary in red and blue. The beginning of each canto was to be completed with an historiated initial, a border and a large vignette. Based on this original plan, the artists achieved:

• for Inferno, the vignettes and the ornamented initials for 31 cantos. The vignette at the beginning of the cantica and that of the last canto have not been completed. The folio where the canto 4 begins has been lost.
• for Purgatory, the vignette of the canto 9.
• for Paradise, the historiated initial and the large vignette at the beginning of the cantica as well as the decorated initials and the vignettes of cantos 2 and 3. The f. 160r, which contains the first canto of Paradise is decorated with the initial L, which reaches 7 lines in height and depicts an angel. In the upper part of the folio, a vignette illustrates Dante and Beatrice, traveling across the heavens of Paradise while holding hands, and Christ surrounded by two red cherubs. The background of the vignette depicts the nine heavens as well as the gold leaf Empyrean behind Christ.
• the red and blue initials of the terzine are completed on f. 1r-144r, 146r-149v, 153 v, 160r-171r, 175 v, 200r-205r, 207v-213r.

The spaces left blank for the vignettes at the beginning of Inferno and Purgatory were filled with later additions. In the fifteenth century, a pen drawing was added to the beginning of the first cantica. In the nineteenth century, two illuminations cut from another manuscript were pasted at the beginning of Inferno and Purgatory, perhaps in order to guarantee a greater aesthetic value for the manuscript (Spagnesi 2000, 140-141).

Note: the pagination “61” is repeated on two adjacent folios.

Bibliography

Abardo, Rudy. 2005. Chiose palatine: ms. Pal. 313 della Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze. Rome: Salerno.

Bertelli, Sandro. 2011. La tradizione della « Commedia » dai manoscritti al testo. II. I codici trecenteschi (oltre l’antica vulgata) conservati a Firenze. Florence: Olschki.

Spagnesi, Alvaro. 200. “All'inizio della tradizione illustrata della Commedia a Firenze: il codice palatino 313 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze”, Rivista di Storia della Miniatura, 5, p. 139-150.

Author and date of the record: Alessio Marziali Peretti, 01/09/2021

English translation: Sara Giguère.