Title: Irritamenta
Description: "Handsomely bound in red leather, [Houghton] MS Typ 411 is one of thousands of rare editions, manuscripts, and documents in that library's Printing and Graphic Arts Section, formerly called the Typography Department. Resembling an old fashioned family Bible at 10x8 inches and some 300 pages, when opened this book reveals no text but a series of fine pen-and-ink drawings, 1,220 illustrations of ancient coins. These are the records of a coin collection owned by Andrea Loredan, a Venetian patrician well known in the 1550s and '60s as a passionate connoisseur of antiquities. Silver tetradrachmas of Athens and Alexander the Great, aurei of Philip and Augustus, denarii of Caesar and his assassins, large Imperial sestertii of Nero and Hadrian, the numismatic images were intended to delight the eye, stir the curiosity, and enflame the acquisitive instincts of prospective buyers, at a time when the cash-strapped patrician was seeking to liquidate the ancient treasures of his private museum.

The volume was, in essence, a sales catalogue, a species of book not often sought out and admired for artistic or literary merit. Yet Loredan and his unknown draftsman, unaware of how they were benefiting future scholars, produced a graphic masterpiece of elegance and charm, a document of the highest importance for the study of Renaissance antiquarianism, humanism, and archaeology ... While written descriptions and even partial catalogues of some Renaissance coin collections have come down to us--for example, the Greek and Roman silver of Cardinal Pietro Barbo, the future Pope Paul II, inventoried in 1457, and the 800 gold coins owned by Duke Ercole II of Ferrara, recorded by his courtier Celio Calcagnini around 1540--the Houghton manuscript is unique in offering an album of pictures of a complete Renaissance collection.

And whereas the written catalogues are often informative enough to allow us to identify the type of coin described in the text, in the Loredan manuscript the abundance of detail permits a modern numismatist to pinpoint an item more precisely to a particular issue, and sometimes to a particular die, based on subsidiary symbols and variations of the portrait that are overlooked in written descriptions ... For art historians such as Cunnally who specialize in tracing the survival and revival of antiquity during the Renaissance, continually asking the 'Watergate' questions--what did they know and when did they know it?--the Loredan manuscript is a precious witness to the abundance and variety of ancient numismatic material available to the artists, as well as their patrons and public, during that period.

Art historians searching for the antique sources available to Titian, Palladio, Sansovino, and other Venetian masters of the Cinquecento should find the drawings of MS Typ 411 particularly interesting"--From publisher's website.
Subjects: Numismatics, collectors and collecting, Coins, Coin collections, Ancient Coins, Pictorial works, Catalogs, Numismatics, Early works to 1800, Renaissance Manuscripts, History, Renaissance Art, Illustrated books, Antiquarians, Collectors and collecting, Houghton Library