Folio from the Gozzoli Album: Title Page

Author: Albert Elen

This is a folio from a hypothetical lost drawing book, a remnant of which is now part of an eighteenth-century album called the Gozzoli Album, held in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. For a general description, see here.

This page was originally folio 31 recto in the hypothetical lost drawing book. The finger smudges in the lower right corner confirm that this was originally a recto page.

The trilingual inscription at the top (translated ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’) is the text that, according to the Gospel of John (19:19-20), was attached as an accusation above Christ's head on the cross; the Latin version is often abbreviated to INRI. The main inscription in Latin above the centre of the page may be translated as ‘Pictures and poems have always had and always will have equal power’ or more freely ‘Painters and poets have always had license to dare anything’. The Latin capital letters are typologically similar to the capitalized inscriptions below the scenes of Gozzoli’s fresco cycle of the life of St Francis in the apsidal chapel of the Church of San Francesco in Montefalco (1450-52).^[1] The quote is from Horace’s (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) famous Ars poetica (1-13: 'pictoribus atque poetis quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.') and forms a fitting title for the present volume, for which purpose this folio 31 from the hypothetical lost drawing book must have been chosen as the first page when the album was constructed. It was certainly not written at that time for this specific purpose, if only because the original folio was cropped and the missing letters at the beginning and end were repeated on the enclosing mounting strips of the album.