The Sforza Hours'
A NEWLY DISCOVERED LEAF OF 'THE SFORZA HOURS' M. L. EVANS IN 1894, twenty-three years after the discovery of the Sforza Hours (BL, Add. MS. 34294) and shortly after its presentation to the British Museum, Sir G. F. Warner, in his monograph on the manuscript, drew attention to a letter from the Milanese illuminator Giovan Pietro Birago. ^ Neither the date nor the addressee was stated in the letter, which sought that a certain Fra Gian Jacopo, then imprisoned in Milan, be detained until he had compensated the writer for the theft of an unfinished book of hours, upon which Birago had been engaged for Bona Sforza, dowager Duchess of Milan. It seems that part of this book was already in Bona's possession and that the stolen fragment had been taken by the thief to Rome, where it had been acquired by Giovanni Maria Sforza, a bastard half-brother of Bona's deceased husband and a future archbishop of Genoa. Although Warner realized both that the Sforza Hours had belonged to Bona and that it had been mutilated, he was too exact a scholar to conclude on this evidence alone that this manuscript was identical with that mentioned in the letter. Over sixty years were to pass before his intuition was proven correct by the discovery of Birago's signature on the illuminated frontispiece of a volume of Antonio Zarotto's Sforziada^ printed at Milan in 1490.^ This frontispiece, in Warsaw, and those in two further presentation copies of the same book, in Paris and London, are demonstrably by the Master of the Sforza Hours, as Birago was previously known.^ Birago's letter claimed that the stolen part of the manuscript was worth 500 ducats, which indicates that it must have been richly decorated.
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