| I am coming back around to the photos of this amazing 1701 Bibliorum that Artciboldo sent me over 10 years ago, he wanted to know if it was a Boyet, and I am going to show you here, why it isn't however the first thing we want to know is whether or not the centerpiece fleuron of the spine compartments is the same in all of these bindings, it certianly look like it, but is it? To find out really, I needed to know the size of the Bibliorum, and having lost touch with Artciboldo meant that I would have to find out for my self. Sometimes you can find this sort of information in WorldCat, first you need to get the title right: Sacrorum Bibliorum Vulgatae editionis concordantiae, Hugonis Cardinalis Ordinis Praedicatorum. fortunately Artciboldo sent me a thousand photos including one of the titlepage without which you are not likely to find it in the Worldcat. |
| You can find it but there are a number of editions and the key to finding exactly this publication is in the last line of text: Editio novissima, prioribus longè auctior & correctior, & cum ipso bibliorum textu accuratissimè collata. |
| Here you can see at the bottom of the page that they give the size as 24 cm, this was lucky because sometimes they do not give the exact size, still a fantastically useful site (click here to see it.) |
| Now we are able to resize Artciboldo's photo to and exact scale and compare it with our other spines, this I have done in Comparative Diagram 2, and you can see that the fleurons compare very well in size. However with the distortion of the photos, is there anyway that we can be sure that these two imprints derive from the same tool? I have asked this sort of question a thousand times and sometimes there are ways of finding out. |
| In Comparative Diagram 3, I have extracted only a part of the fleuron, and compared it side by side, by manualy counting the individual beads, if there was the slightest difference you would notice it, and while someone may be able to create a very close copy of a tool, they cannot produce anything like a perfect match such as this, therefore we can be 99% certain that this fleuron derives from the same tool, and it is a tool that was used by René Dubuisson. On the other hand we see that the branch tools that have been used in the 1701 panels look very much like those used by Boyet. With the naked eye you would probably say that these branches are Boyet's. |
| In Comparative Diagram 4, I have greatly enlarged these imprints and although the Bibliorum example is a fine copy, we can see that it is not an exact copy, certain small details differ and when you see this you know that this is not a binding by Boyet. |
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| Even experts are sometimes wrong, before you spend thousands on a book, please do your own research! Just because I say a certain binding can be attributed to le Maitre isn't any kind of guarantee, don't take my word for it, go a step further and get your own proof. In these pages I have provided you with a way of doing just that. |
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