A Deluxe Colored Copy of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, 1501
This handsome volume of De philosophico consolatu by the famed sixth-century Roman patrician Boethius is one of the first major illustrated editions of this foundational philosophical text, a work that was in fact rarely illustrated throughout the early era of print. It comprises seventy-eight woodcuts, including four full-page engravings that follow Boethius through his conversation with Lady Philosophy about fame and fortune, evil and virtue.
The reader first encounters Boethius at the crossroads of civilization and barbarism. He stands accused of treason and is about to be carried off to a prison cell fearing for his life at the hands of Theodoric, the murderous barbarian king of the Ostrogoths. While he was languishing in prison on charges of conspiracy against the crown, Lady Philosophy appeared to Boethius and inspired him to compose his Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue in prose and verse that is a concise and accessible summa synthesizing pagan philosophy and early Christian theology.
Boethius’s late-antique Consolatio would go on to be reproduced and translated in hundreds of manuscript copies throughout the Middle Ages, its ubiquity all but assuring its access and consumption by nearly every literate European reader. A standard didactic school text for many, the Consolatio inspired generations of medieval and early modern theologians, philosophers, and poets, among them Dante, Chaucer, and Milton, to name but a few. No less than seventy-three incunabular editions appeared between 1473 and 1501, making it perhaps the most widely read philosophical work, alongside Cicero’s De officiis, of the first half-century of printing by moveable type.
The most beautiful of all the woodcut engravings in the Hopkins 1501 copy of the Consolatio appears at the beginning of the first part of the dialogue and is adorned with a fine illuminated coat of arms in blue and gold, as well as a handsomely colored woodcut border of flowers and birds. There the initials “F” and “V” are bound together by a love knot at the center, presumably referring to the owner(s) of this edition, who otherwise remain anonymous. The facing page depicts Boethius himself, in the ancient Roman fora with his sons, delivering a most eloquent speech to his fellow senators and heralded by a troupe of musicians.
The typographical format of this work is variable and flexible, of a very fine quality, and clearly produced alongside its many fine illustrations at great expense—a masterpiece of graphic design created just after the very tail end of the incunabular period. Only the first six of the volume’s woodcuts are fully hand-colored, and thereafter only partially so, in three hues of green, shaded either with blue, brown, or yellow. Only partially colored, heavily illustrated books of this period are uncommon and so this one suggests an inexplicable abandonment of an initially robust, promising, but perhaps overly ambitious effort to render the entire volume in fine living color.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Dario Brancato, “Readers and Interpreters of the Consolatio in Italy, 1300–1550,” in Noel Harold Kaylor and Philip Edward Phillips (eds.), A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2012), 357–411; Mariken Goris, “Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae and the Early Printing Tradition,” in Lotte Hellinga et al. (eds.), The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book Trade, 1473–1941 (Brill, 2001), 49–54; Lodi Nauta, “The Consolation: The Latin Commentary Tradition, 800–1700,” in John Marenbon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225–78.
