Biography

Federico Botana is an art historian. The subject of his first monograph, published in 2012, was the representation of the works of Mercy in medieval Italian art. Since then, his research has focused on illuminated manuscripts. In 2020, he published a book on illustrated manuscripts and education in Quattrocento Florence, the main output of a three-year Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. In 2020-23, he was one of the researchers in the project 'CULTIVATE MSS Cultural Values and the International Trade in Medieval European Manuscripts, c.1900-1945', conducted at the University of London, for which he investigated the activities of Italian antiquarian bookdealers, notably Tammaro De Marinis and Leo S. Olschki.

Project Summary

Leo S. Olschki (1861-1940) was one of the most successful bookdealers in history. Private collectors and public libraries across the world bought rare books from his firm in Florence. Many of the Italian medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that entered public collections in the twentieth century were traded by Olschki at some point or another. Consequently, Olschki had a bearing on the building of those collections, which in turn influenced the development of scholarship on the Italian Renaissance. But Olschki had more direct means of influence. He founded the prestigious publishing house that still functions today. Amongst Olschki’s early publications was Paolo d'Ancona's monumental survey on Florentine illumination, La miniatura fiorentina (1914). La Bibliofilía, the erudite journal founded by Olschki in 1899, regularly featured articles on Italian medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. These articles were written by eminent scholars, notably art historians such as Paolo d'Ancona and Mario Salmi, and also philologists such as Pio Rajna, Giuseppe Vandelli, and Enrico Rostagno. Their contributions often discussed manuscripts that Olschki was offering for sale. It is reasonable to presume that some of those scholars wrote entries for Olschki's sale catalogues and even helped him selecting manuscripts for his stock. This project explores how scholarship influenced Olschki's business decisions, and vice versa, how commercial interests influenced scholarship and ultimately shaped our understanding of Italian Renaissance manuscripts.