The Court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II produced nothing more amazing than the Mira colligrophioe monumenta, a flamboyant demonstration of two arts-Calligraphy and miniature painting.
Forty-eight of its pages are reproduced in this book, containing samples of classic italic hands; historical, invented, and exhibition hands
Rotunda, a classicizing humanist script based on Carolingian miniscule; classically based scripts; and Gothic blackletter and chancery..
The manuscript is now in the collections of the Getty Museum.
The combination of word and images is rare and, on its tiny scale, constitutes one of the marvels of the Central European Renaissance.
Years later, at Rudolf\'s behest, Court artist Joris Hoefnagel filled the spaces on each manuscript page with images of fruit, flowers, insects, and other natural minutiae.
Many were intended not for practical use but for virtuosic display.
A preeminent scribe, Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historic scripts.
The project began when Rudolf\'s predecessor commissioned the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay to create a model book of calligraphy.
The Court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II produced nothing more amazing than the Mira colligrophioe monumenta, a flamboyant demonstration of two arts-Calligraphy and miniature painting
