Printed Books of Hours from Fifteenth-Century Italy: The Texts, the Books, and the Survival of a Long-Lasting Genre. Cristina Dondi. Biblioteca di Bibliografia: Documents and Studies in Book and Library History 204. Florence: Olschki, 2016. xlviii + 708 pp. €95.
examines how books are increasingly represented in artworks in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the readership became more and more interested in novels and illustrated fiction. Dillard analyzes the new generations of readers, especially women, who are manically attached to books in order to improve themselves. Through several examples Dillard offers “a practical view of readership during this period, displaying models that extended into the nineteenth century as illustration and novel alike become more broadly embraced” (275). The multifaceted portrait of the marriage between words and images from manuscripts to the modern age offered by this volume encourages us to pursue this path to a better understanding of how images visualized texts, ideas, and cultural innovations.