MISSAL OF BARBARA OF BRANDEBURG
Diocese of Mantua - Archives of the Cathedral

In 1442 Gian Lucido Gonzaga, bishop of Milan, commissioned Belbello da Pavia, an illuminator and Italy’s most important exponent of international Gothic, to create a missal.
Due to the death of the client, the Missal was not achieved; in 1459, during the Council of Mantua, Barbara of Brandenburg-Gonzaga decided to have the codex completed and, with the advice of Andrea Mantegna, she commissioned to this task Girolamo da Cremona, a young exponent of the dawning Renaissance who had already taken part in the illumination of the famous Bible of Borso d’Este in Ferrara.
This masterpiece perfectly expresses, through the magnificence of its illuminations, the transition from the Gothic age to the Renaissance — as a matter of fact, it took 23 years to be accomplished (1442 to 1465) and two outstanding artists, representative of different styles and epochs.
The codex is opened by a 12 pages calendar with ornaments along the external margins. The following 68 miniatures include 2 big initials, 7 ff. with decorations all around the text, more than 2,000 illuminated capital letters of different size and hundreds of ink-decorated paragraph initials.
The Latin text was written by Pietro Paolo Ma­rono, who also worked as a calligrapher at the Bible of Borso d’Este.
In order to enable the making of the facsimile edition, the original codex was unstitched, it then underwent a partial restoration and it was given a new binding. After being lent to an important exhibition on Mantegna, held at the Louvre, in Paris, in September 2009, the original manuscript is now properly preserved in the Museo Diocesano at Mantua.