Praying (and embroidering) by number

We present here an illustrated incunable of exceeding rarity: the first and only edition of the Florentine Compagnia del Psalterio ovvero Rosario della gloriosissima Vergine Maria (see the complete description here), of which only four copies are recorded among institutional libraries, these being held in the Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio in Bologna, the Biblioteca degli Intronati in Siena, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, although the latter copy is incomplete.

The edition contains the text, in Italian vernacular, of the statutes and other writings concerning the Florentine Compagnia del Rosario, the Rosary sodality officially established in May 1481. The twelve-leaf book therefore belongs to the popular genre of so-called libri da compagnia, which includes statutes, bulls, privileges, and indulgences regarding the numerous religious confraternities or sodalities established in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as a distinctive form of piety and devotion encouraged by mendicant orders.

The Company of the Rosary is closely associated with the Florentine Dominican cloister of San Marco, where the Compagnia was offered the altar of the Annunciation to the immediate right of the entrance to the church for the celebration of their devotions. Later, in about 1490, the Company commissioned a fine altarpiece depicting the Virgin of the Rosary, generally ascribed to Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507) – a Florentine painter who was especially active for the Dominican order – which is now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

Cosimo Rosselli (attr.), The Virgin of the Rosary (ca. 1490). Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

The printing of the Compagnia del Psalterio ovvero Rosario della gloriosissima Vergine Maria was performed on behalf of the friars of San Marco. The edition was issued entirely anonymously and without any date, although it is generally attributed – on the basis of the type employed for setting the text – to Antonio di Bartolomeo Miscomini, who was active as a printer in Florence between 1481-1485 and 1489-1495. Miscomini’s production was focused both on ‘high’ Florentine humanist works – he published several by Marsilio Ficino, including the first edition of the De triplici vita in 1489 (see the complete description here) – as well as popular texts in Italian vernacular, including statutes, sacre rappresentazioni, and devotional writings. The printer issued this edition of the Compagnia del Psalterio ovvero Rosario della gloriosissima Vergine Maria sometime after 4 May 1485, since this is the date in which its statutes – whose text is included in the edition – were officially approved by the then Master General of the Dominican order, the Bolognese Bartolomeo Comazzi.

The practice of the rosary has a Dominican origin. According to tradition, it was given to St. Dominic de Guzman (1170-1221), the founder of the order, in a vision of the Virgin Mary. The first Confraternity or Company of the Rosary was founded by the Breton Dominican Alanus de Rupe, or Alain de la Roche (1428-1475) in Douai around 1468. The phenomenon quickly spread across Europe, especially after the official approval of the devotional exercise, issued by Pope Sixtus IV in 1474. The Florentine Compagnia was established in May 1481, closely following the model of that founded in Cologne in 1475.

Basically, the practice of the rosary requires the recitation of 150 Ave Marias (Hail Mary), arranged in groups of ten, followed by a Pater Nosters (Our Father) at even intervals. This repetitive devotional exercise is linked to mental contemplation on themes of joy and sorrow, through a series of Mysteries or crucial events from the lives of Christ and his mother Mary. The prayers could be repeated holding a string or circlet of beads (rosario) in one’s hands to count the recitations.

The number of Ave Marias was certainly inspired by the 150 psalms that comprise David’s Psalter. For this reason, the Rosary was known as the Virgin’s Psalter, and the corresponding confraternity – as the title of the Florentine booklet also attests – is also called the Compagnia del Psalterio, or the Psalter Confraternity. The reading of an Officium Beatae Virginis Mariae and the oral repetition of Ave Marias and Pater Nosters were very closely related forms of Marian devotion, both belonging to female religious exercises practiced in domestic spaces or within the walls of a convent.

The Florentine edition of the Compagnia del Psalterio ovvero Rosario della gloriosissima Vergine Maria presented here is illustrated with two woodcuts, stamped on opposite pages, the subjects of which are deeply related to the rosary practice as well as the Rosary confraternity. Both images contributed to the development of rosary iconography and of the Marian cult more generally.

The half-page woodcut on the recto of fol. a2 depicts the Annunciation, represented according to popular Florentine style.

The choice of this iconographical theme fulfills various purposes. The first is related to the rosary practice itself: beginning with the Annunciation, worshippers were required to recite one Pater Noster and ten Ave Marias for each Mystery. The first purpose of the woodcut is therefore devotional: the image functions as an introduction to the most important Marian Mystery – also known as the Joyful Mystery of the Dominican Rosary – the Annunciation, and to guide personal, private contemplation on Incarnation.

By contrast, the second function is ‘official’, or public: the scene recalls the privilege obtained by the Florentine confraternity to use the Annunciation altar in the Church of St Marco, whose feast on 25 March was celebrated in Medicean Florence with especial emphasis. The image, furthermore, introduces the reader to the Statutes. In fact, beneath the vignette, a long passage printed in red illustrates the officially approved contents of the book, which includes ordinations, institutions, chapter rulings, regulations, privileges, and indulgences associated with membership in the Company of the Psalter or Rosary.

More complex is the iconographical structure and meaning of the other woodcut illustrating the booklet.

This large woodcut on the verso of the first leaf shows the emblem of the confraternity – as the inscription printed in black explains – ‘elsegno della co[m]pagnia del Rosario della Vergine Maria’, i.e. This is the sign of the Company of the Rosary of the Virgin Mary.

This emblem is shown within an octagonal border. A garland of fifteen rose clusters surrounds a crown with five finials. Below the crown are the capital letters ‘RSM’, i.e. Rosarium Sanctae Mariae.

A chaplet (the rosary, also called, significantly, corona or crown) hangs down from the apex of the garland, punctuated by five large beads (possibly symbolizing the Five Wounds of Christ), and ending in a cross.

The octagonal border immediately recalls the image of the hortus conclusus, the ‘walled garden’ or ‘enclosed garden’, which occurs in Solomon’s Song of Songs (4:12), and identifies the bride as a garden: 

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse,

a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

This image – a symbol of Mary’s chastity and purity – is present in countless medieval commentaries, hymns, and Marian poems, often in the form of a pleasant rose garden. The religious allegory became a similarly widespread iconographic symbol. Numerous paintings, miniatures and early woodcuts – often single-leaf woodcuts – present the image of Mary seated within a walled garden, embellished by rose plants. The rose has an especially prominent role in Marian iconography: Mary is the rosa sine spina, i.e. the rose without thorns, alluding to her perfect nature. A rose garland symbolizes the rosary itself, and at the same time represents a wreath in Mary’s honour.

There are clear stylistic differences between the two woodcuts illustrating this edition.

The woodcut of the emblem or sign of the Company involves successions of short, distinct lines. It could therefore also relate to a template for embroidery, suggesting that the segno or emblem could actually be embroidered on garments or vestments used within the Company.

“It should be clear that the word ‘rosary’ encompasses several, interlocked meanings. The rosary is not only a kind of prayer exercise, but the word refers to the chain of beads used while reciting this prayer, as well as a garland made of roses, which is the both factual and symbolic result of praying the exercise. In a derived figurative sense, the prayer also generated textiles taking the shape of garments and headcovers”.

(A. M. W. As-Vijvens, “Weaving Mary’s Chaplet: The Representation of the Rosary in Late Medieval Manuscript illumination”, K.M. Rudy – B. Baert (eds.), Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing. Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages,Turnhout 2007, p. 46).

This woodcut may have also circulated separately from the book published in 1485, perhaps even as single sheets issued to coincide with the official establishment of the Compagnia del Rosario in May 1481, and possibly printed by the press established at the Dominican nun monastery of San Jacopo di Bagno di Ripoli. In this context, it is especially noteworthy that this Florentine convent was not only the seat of a printing press, but also an important centre for embroidery and needlework.

The Florentine Stamperia at the convent of San Jacopo di Bagno di Ripoli operated from 1476 to 1484, and its activity can be reconstructed in great detail thanks to its diario or account book, which is kept at the National Library in Florence and has been entirely edited by Melissa Conway (The Diario of the Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli 1476-1484, Florence 1999). The account book contains several notes relating to editions and sales, and states that the Ripoli press produced, among other things, numerous devotional booklets, libri da compagnia, and sacred images, mostly focused on subjects especially popular in the Dominican milieu.

As the Company of the Rosary was established in May 1481, the Dominican friars of San Marco asked the printers who were then active at the San Iacopo di Ripoli to produce “1000. Immagini di Maria Vergine del Rosario”, i.e. “a thousand images of Mary Virgin of the Rosary” (V. Fineschi, Notizie storiche sopra la Stamperia di Ripoli, Firenze 1781, p. 34), to be distributed as single sheets not only among members of the newly established Compagnia, but also to be sent to female houses under the protection of the convent of San Marco.

Printed images like these had an essential role in devotional practices as a visual guide for adoration and meditation. One such piece of ephemera survives in a unique copy kept at the British Museum, depicting the crowned Virgin Mary in a mandorla of sun rays. After all,

“such images were put to a variety of uses. In many cases they were attached to pieces of furniture, including doors, ceilings, choir stalls, chests, and even the predella of painted altarpieces. In the context of the female religious community, they provide decoration within the privacy of the nun’s cell, attached to the shutters of private wardrobes, or to the wall itself, in place of a frescoed image or a small painted panel”.

(A. Thomas, “Images of St Catherine: A Re-evaluation of Cosimo Rosselli and the Influence of his Art on the Woodcut and Metal Engravings Images of the Dominican Third Order”, G. Neher – R. Shepherd (eds.), Revaluing Renaissance Art, Aldershot 2000, p. 166).

Therefore, the “thousand images of Mary Virgin of the Rosary” may not have been the only work commissioned by the friars of San Marco to the press of San Iacopo di Ripoli in the early 1480s: perhaps we might add a broadsheet bearing the emblem of the Company, an image that would have then been re-proposed in the described copy of the Compagnia del Psalterio ovvero Rosario della gloriosissima Vergine libro da compagnia, and possibly even embroidered – as a textile metaphor of a popular form of Marian devotion – by nuns and lay women used to praying by numbers.

How to cite this information

Margherita Palumbo, “Praying (and embroidering) by number,” PRPH Books, 17 March 2021, www.prphbooks.com/blog/rosary. Accessed [date].

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