| Abstrakt: |
This dissertation addresses the study of Portuguese Hebrew manuscripts produced between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. A comprehensive analysis of this heritage was carried out in its material, historical, cultural and artistic aspects, with a particular focus on the production of the second half of the fifteenth century, which encompasses the majority of the remaining manuscripts. The corpus is comprised of nearly sixty Hebrew manuscripts produced in cities such as Lisbon, Faro, Torres Vedras, Elvas, Évora, Guarda, Leiria, Loulé, Moura, Porto, Santiago do Cacém, Seia and Setúbal. However, the number of manuscripts produced in Lisbon is overwhelming and comprises almost all of the illuminated manuscripts, studied in this dissertation. While the copy of the manuscripts was, for the most part, a private enterprise, carried out by scribes who worked to patrons, the illumination of codices was made by two distinct teams of illuminators, probably associated in two different workshops, active in Lisbon in the last two decades of the fifteenth century. The identification of a new illuminated manuscript with cólofon - the Moscow Bible of 1496 - allowed to define with more rigor the chronology of several non-dated codices with similar decoration. In terms of style the illuminations of the Lisbon School are affiliated in the late Gothic and Proto-Renaissance, showing the receptivity of the Jewish community (or at least of its cultural and economic elite, responsible for ordering the volumes) to the culture of the Christian majority. The study of the Portuguese Hebrew incunabula, produced in the same period, and the analysis of the printed decorative borders, allowed the conclusion that there is a visual continuity between the Hebrew manuscript and the first printed editions, and there are mutual interchanges between the illuminated borders of the manuscripts and the borders of incunabula. After the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal in 1496/97, the main destination of these books was the Italic Peninsula and also North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, as can be seen from the internal information left by the successive owners in the books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
