Sulla cerchia del Maestro del retablo di Bolea : il manoscritto Vat. lat. 8691 della Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

This article is focused on manuscript Vat. lat. 8691 of the Vatican Library, containing Giovanni Pontano’s De fortitudine and De principe. It demonstrates that this codex, copied from the edition of the two treatises printed in Naples by Mattia Moravo in 1490, was produced in the same city in the second half of the first decade of the 16th century, probably around 1508. It also shows that the manuscript was illuminated by two artists, one of Flemish culture and the other of antiquarian culture, who appear, thanks to a number of codices attributable to them, to be fairly close collaborators of the Master of the Bolea altarpiece. This paper identifies the patron of the manuscript, too, who corresponds, as demonstrated above all by the coat of arms displayed on the first incipit page, to the famous bibliophile Andrea Matteo III Acquaviva, Duke of Atri. It finally suggests that this last one, participating in the enthusiastic reception of Pontano’s works typical of that time, intended to symbolically claim, by means of the manuscript itself, his humanistic education as well as the legitimacy of his political position, hardly regained at the beginning of the Spanish Viceroyalty.