Double Openings Commemorating the First World War: Nestore Leoni and the Revival of Illumination in Italy

This paper presents two manuscripts commemorating First World War that were illuminated between 1915 and 1932 by Nestore Leoni, a fundamental figure in the revival of the art of manuscript painting in Italy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of double-page illuminated openings in diverse sections of the two volumes reveals a sequentially developed visual and ideological argument justifying the Italian entrance into the First World War as a sacrifice that was necessary to unify the country. The techniques and visual motifs of the illuminated manuscripts especially follow quattrocento florentine models, not only to recuperate the art of manuscript painting but also to highlight the identity of a people who, as acknowledged throughout Europe, had arrived at an apex of artistic attainment in the period of the Renaissance. Embedded in traditional medieval and Renaissance manuscript decorative schemes including friezes with roundels, white vine initials, and purple and blue grounds woven with gold, one however also finds elements from a more recent past that cite paintings and prints from the ‘heroic’ eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include ornamental and animal motifs from the contemporary Italian Art Nouveau movement, and above all, citations of documentary material of the First World War, including propaganda postcards, photographs, and films. The texts of the manuscripts are simply official summaries of the reports of the war efforts conducted by sea, by land, and by air, but the images create other levels of signification through quotes and references culled from artistic monuments produced throughout the peninsula’s history from ancient to modern times. Included are extraordinarily precise renderings of ancient and modern instruments of warfare. The illuminators emulated the praxis of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts where text and image signify through interrelationships across the page and the double opening of the codex form. Meaning is conveyed similarly through visual references to the past, but that are greatly amplified in detail and in levels of historical reference to create a new form of illumination.