This article re-examines a corpus of nine sheets – eight stored at the Boston Public Library and one at the National Gallery of Art in Washington – all part of a dismembered small Italian Biblia Pauperum. Previously always considered in the specific bibliography as a work of the school of Verona or Cristoforo Cortese, these sheets have now been incorporated by the present author for the first time into the corpus of works of the Master of the Avicenna of Bologna, who scholars now identify with the historical figure Giovanni di Niccolò Bellini the Elder (brother of the Jacopo Bellini and uncle of the painter Giovanni Bellini), who was most probably active in Ferrara around 1440-1460. It is possible that these nine drawings fit into an early stage in the artistic career of the painter-miniaturist, when, perhaps in Venice, between text and image leads the present author to suppose that the codex might have been intented as a workshop repertory of sources for compositions or single figures, not excluding, considering their chronology, a connection with the production of devotional xylografic prints.
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