In trasparenza: un confronto tra le filigrane del corpus aldrovandiano delle tavole della Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna e del ms. 2 della Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina di Roma

Abstract

Manuscript 2 in the Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina was made between 1584 and 1590 by order of Ulisse Aldrovandi for Francesco Maria II della Rovere, the last duke of Urbino, who later became his patron and supported him financially in the printing of Ornithologia. In order to reconstruct the complex and mysterious history of manuscript 2, for decades fuelled only by fanciful hypotheses, I started from a stratigraphic analysis of the artefact, going on to examine all those ‘material and objective’ components linked to its packaging: in particular the binding and its ornamentation, the paper and watermark, and the contents. The analysis and identification of the watermark of ms. 2 led to extending the research to the entire Aldrovandan corpus of Bologna animal plates. We present the very first results of the study carried out “in transparency” on the Bologna watermarks.