About Us
We are an e-commerce distributor of manuscripts and facsimile artworks made in Italy. We have agreements with the most renowned and appreciated companies in the sector, known for the quality of their works.
On our website, we offer the complete facsimile representation of each work, a browsable sculpture, which is the three-dimensional replica of a manuscript created in its natural size. Each one is created respecting the actual size, three-dimensionality, weight, texture of the support, and color nuances.
It is a luxury item, obtained through sophisticated and expensive processes.
The History of Manuscripts and Facsimiles
The manuscript accompanies a very long period of human history, more or less coinciding with the Middle Ages.
The manuscript codex, in the form we know, begins from the 1st century AD and reaches full diffusion in the 4th-5th century AD.
The paper manuscript codex spreads from the Western Mediterranean starting from the 11th century AD, thanks to the mediation of the Arabs, while in China paper was known from the 2nd century AD. The first documented paper mill in Europe is in Xativa, near Valencia, from 1056.
The manuscript is an object that for the first time makes the contained information easily accessible, allowing for selective and quick reading. It is a rare and precious object, often enriched with miniatures and decorations, sometimes in precious metal.
In the Early Middle Ages, manuscripts were created by monks for the dissemination of religious precepts.
In the Late Middle Ages, the range of patrons expanded to include princes, nobles, and wealthy merchants, and the production cycle expanded to artisan workshops and artists. The themes covered expanded: law, astrology, commercial practices, stories. Similarly, Latin and Greek were progressively replaced by the vernacular, the language in which the Divine Comedy is written.
The need to make copies of the original manuscript, already accompanied by the colophon declaring the main characteristics of the copy, as we still do today, has always existed. This was to facilitate the dissemination of content, the circulation of information, and to demonstrate the economic and social prestige of the owner. In fact, the manuscript and its copies, besides being book-tools, are book-objects, carriers of a symbolic, cultural message of prestige transcending that conveyed by the text.
Often, the complete and three-dimensional facsimile is necessary for consulting the work because readers are often denied free access to manuscript collections for conservation purposes.
A curiosity: history has testified to, among others, two great collectors of manuscripts: Petrarch and Boccaccio, the latter donating his catalog as a legacy to the Augustinian convent of Santo Spirito in Florence.