Baroque prayer book owned by the rector of the University of Vienna

[Jesuit prayer book]. Magnis, Giovanni Pietro, Italo-Austrian physician (1558-1618). Septem psalmi poenitentiales & aliae devotae orationes.

€ 35.000,00

A highly original manuscript prayerbook, finely illustrated, skillfully executed and richly decorated throughout, commissioned by the Italian-born physician Giovanni Pietro Magnis of Como (Johann Peter Magnus in German), a Jesuit professor of philosophy and medicine at the University of Vienna and eight times dean of the medical faculty.

The manuscript features three hand-painted illuminations and eighteen engraved plates exquisitely hand-coloured and illuminated with extensive gold, accompanied by a text in meticulous black and gold Latin calligraphy which imitates early Latin printing type. Its pages show carefully hand-drawn capitals, headers, and tailpieces alongside the plates, each gilt by hand, in a fascinating combination of manuscript and early print in both style and production. The patron's full-page coat of arms, in rich colours and extensively gilt, follows the hand-painted title-page. It features two text cartouches, that at the head giving his motto ("Qui sperat in Domino non confundetur", "He who trusts in the Lord shall not be perplexed") and that at the foot identifying him ("Ioannes Petrus Magnus philosophiae ac medicinae d[octor] Novocomensis / MDCI").

Magnus served as rector of Vienna's university from 1608 onwards; in 1612 he became personal physician to the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias in Prague, though he later returned to Vienna and died there. The prayer book would thus have been produced in Vienna. Magnus evidently had a taste for the Low Countries art of the day: nearly all of the plates used in the prayerbook were executed by the Antwerp engraver Hieronymus Wierix (1553-1619); a fine portrait of Magnis, drawn in Prague by the Flemish artist Aegidius Sadeler II (1580-1629) and subsequently engraved, survives in the Rijksmuseum.