Hobson’s work is a happy surprise. He has managed to weave together a survey of 15th century ‘humanist’ bindings with a clear and lively narrative that gently argues for a narrowed focus, an appreciation of a small group of radical scholars and craftsmen centered in the Venetian town of Padua. From the very start of Hobson’s work, it is hard not to get pulled into the exuberance of the movement he’s describing, the lively engagement of the humanists with every task they put themselves to. In introducing several of the key Paduan players, including the binders Giovanni Marcanova and Felice Feliciano, Hobson describes a trip that they took together exploring the coast of Lake Garda. They had wrapped their boat in laurel, and with their friend appointed the captain, wearing a crown of myrtle and periwinkle, they sailed around the lake playing the lute and searching out beauty. With this image, Hobson gives us a glimpse into the nascent excitement among young Paduan scholars that could be easily overlooked by diligent study of studia humanitatis. The humanist scholar Ciriaco claimed that his goal was to “raise the dead,” and when we look at the aesthetics of Hobson’s 15th century binders, we begin to see that this had just as much to do with awakening the present by the force of creation as saving the past through careful study (the two, of course, would have been seen as inseparable).
Hobson devotes several chapters to the humanist elements that are found in late 15th and early 16th century bindings. Here, eventually, we have architectural compositions, tooling forming romanesque arches and portals, stamps mimicking classical coins and other such overt nods backwards. More subtly, we have classical tools creeping into the binder’s collection, anthemia and laurel bands, the odd lion’s mask and the ever-present renaissance dolphin. Before these clearly classical adaptations, though, Hobson traces the humanist binder’s first novel influence, and indeed one of the most radical transformations of western binding, islamic gold tooling. Hobson points out (in the sort of claim that invites a trip to the stacks to find confirmation) that before gold-tooling there had really only been two major techniques introduced to western binding since the reign of Charlemagne, panel-stamping and lederschnitt (cuir-ciselé). The next great technique was discovered on Islamic bindings, primarily Mamluk, which made their way from the Levant to Italian cities in the 14th century (gold tooling had been used as early as the 13th century in Morocco, and its quality was already in decline in the east by the time it became popular in Italy). Up until these eastern bindings found their way to the new generation of humanist scholars and craftsmen, the main decorative influence in Italian bindings was the Parisian manner of blind-stamping small tools all-over in a series of rows. Some binders and printers took quickly to the Islamic style, especially in Florence, and the knot-work decoration and geometric style, the complex colored roundels and arabesques, were quickly known as the modo florentino. The style took a while to gain popularity, but it was soon favored by the humanists of Padua, who moved quickly from simply copying Mamluk and Moroccan examples to developing Islamic designs of their own.
Which brings us to one overarching question: what is humanist about adopting a contemporaneous, Islamic binding technique? Hobson skirts the issue a bit, though he does address the question. He gives several examples of why the technique and style would be taken up in general. Gold tooling was opulent, attractive to the merchant class, it was more finely executed than the parisian style and more attractive to the Renaissance eye. Finally, Hobson believes that it may have been cheaper than alternative embellishments (such as expensively dyed cloth doublures). As for why it may have been attractive to the Paduan humanists, he points out that there were no classical examples of the craft to look back to, and that the new style was untainted by the recent unschooled past.
I think, though, that what we find in these bindings is a side of humanisim that is often overlooked. The point of that boat trip on Lake Garda was not simply to recreate the past with lyre and crown, but also to actively explore, to find beauty where it existed and to encounter it with a humanity shaped by classical understanding. Humanisim, while it held strongly onto the belief that pinnacles of wisdom were to be found in the past (ad fontes!), was incontrovertibly looking behind as a means of moving forward. Hobson shows us a binding by Feliciano on which onlaid glass beads form a striking centerpiece, a technique that was wholly Feliciano’s and anything but traditional. This was an aesthetic flare that was completely humanistic in its individualism and in its educated transgression of constraint. The Paduan humanists adopted Islamic tooling, a technique as far from their normal romanesque influences as imaginable, because they deemed it alive, engaging, and worthy of representing the rediscovered understanding of beauty that they were fighting so hard to return to their lives.