Resumen de Una storia al femminile: il Salterio della Biblioteca del Seminario di Padova
The exceptional beauty of its full-page miniatures and historiated initials in a distinctive Gothic language makes the superb Psalter in the Biblioteca del Seminario vescovile in Padua (ms. 353) one of the highest examples of thirteenth-century European illumination. Its materials excellent quality � the fine parchment, the extensive use of burnished and pounced gold leaf, the precious coloured inks, and the very good pigments and colours � indicate that this lavish manuscript results from a very prestigious commission. The patroness appears in the miniature on fol. 133v as a modestly dressed lady kneeling devoutly in front of the Virgin enthroned with the Child. The liturgical calendar and the litany point out a link with North-Eastern France and in particular with the Meaux diocese, near Paris, but the manuscript was almost certainly illuminated in the French capital, possibly at the end of the 1260s as the analysis of script and decoration seem to confirm. The comparison with some of the most sumptuous Parisian exemplars commissioned by the royalty in the 1250s-1270s confirms both the exceptionality of this Psalter in thirteenth-century illumination history and the high status of its female patron. The detailed examination of the calendar may shed light on her mysterious identity revealing her possible relation to the Capetian court on the one hand and the counts of Champagne on the other.
At the end of the fourteenth century, the Psalter was already in Padua in possession of another distinguished female owner named Bartolomea Da Carrara. She was the abbess of the Paduan Benedictine monastery of San Pietro and maybe a descendant of the influential Carrara family. After her death in 1413, the codex was preserved by the nuns of San Pietro until it entered the Biblioteca del Seminario in the nineteenth century, probably before the monastery of San Pietro was suppressed in 1810.
