Marcus Tullius Cicero, Epistolae ad familiares (Letters to Friends)

This grand and brilliantly decorated manuscript is an important survival of the early Florentine humanist tradition and represents one of the earliest recoveries of Cicero’s letters after the medieval period. It is also significant for its original blind-stamped goatskin Florentine binding. European bindings until this date were in most cases bound in thick wooden boards often with heavy metal studs and clasps. But in Florence, starting the second quarter of the fifteenth century, a small number of humanist scholars and patrons began to bind books blind-stamped with Islamic style designs.