The Heroic Manuscript: the world’s greatest book
23.06 – 30.08.2015
MALATESTA LIBRARY
Bufalini Square, Cesena (FC) Italy
The Heroic Manuscript is a massive collective project designed to celebrate the 550th anniversary of Cesena’s Biblioteca Malatestiana, the first civic library in the world to be included by UNESCO in the Memory of the World register. Malatesta Novello donated it in 1465 to his city, now Cesena reciprocates the gift with a gift made by all its inhabitants, a work worthy of being housed in such a library, the largest manuscript in the world: The Heroic Manuscript.
The Guinness Book of Records work tells the adventurous story of Cesena’s Biblioteca Malatestiana and its founder Novello Malatesta.
Pages, 210 cm high and 140 cm wide. The tome, which is divided into 19 chapters boasts the presence of 19 nationally renowned artists from the Emilia-Romagna area who wanted to give their work as a gift by creating a miniature (60 cm x 60 cm) for each chapter and offering their artistic contribution to the project also by working in schools together with students in the realization of the letterheads.
On display, therefore, are the works of artists Lucia Baldini, Claudio Ballestracci, Silvano Barducci, Maurizio Battaglia, Kiril Cholakov, Alberto Cosentino, Lorenzo di Lucido, Sabrina Foschini, Luca Giovagnoli, Federico Guerri, Tinin Mantegazza, Dacia Manto, Olivia Marani, Massimo Modula, Mauro Moscatelli, Luca Piovaccari, Franco Pozzi, Denis Riva, and Erich Turroni.
Biblioteca Malatestiana, the first civic library in the world
Kiril Cholakov, drawing for The Heroic Manuscript, 2015
The heroic feat
The past and the future of humanity lie in the story.
Imagination and memory need a narrative to germinate, and when this takes the form of a book, it is as if it finds a new root and a new wheel. It takes nest and flight, dwelling and journey. It incarnates and multiplies.
The ancient practice of manual book transcription took on the cadence of a sacred liturgy of storytelling, an alphabetical rosary recited at the tip of a pen and in lakes of ink. Slowly and meticulously, the written word unfolded, full of beauty and measure, rhythm and harmony, in the awareness of being an image as well, and it was precisely from a figurative intertwining that this flow of meaning and feeling emerged. There was no book that did not have, in a colorful and visionary design, the source of that torrential flow of words. There were books that reiterated the source of a page, with infinite variants, each of which was unique and competed in fantasy and nuance with the previous one. Illuminated initials, heavy with meaning or lost in the swirls of decoration, gave a harmonious note to the score of letters that began to unfold on the page.
The pages themselves were imbued with existence, a reminder of life and at the same time a warning of death; they were tanned skin of kids and male lambs that, separated from the flesh, became parchment docile to ink. The mined codices were therefore flocks bound in a sheepfold made of shelves, parchment sewn into volumes and gathered on wooden shelves.
Every part of the book had a reason and a story; a tale that was in the background of another tale.
The oldest public library still preserves those codices, those sediments of memories and events, of symbols and meanings that Novello Malatesta wanted to establish for the community of Cesena and for the whole world in the mid-fifteenth century.
All this past has been brought to the present by a group of artists and young calligraphers who have narrated, through images and writing, the story of that visionary enterprise and the fate that followed, undertaking themselves a task that is appropriately defined as heroic.
Text by Massimo Pulini
Claudio Cavalli, creator and curator of the book.
Kiril Cholakov, drawing for The Heroic Manuscript, Drawing Biennial Rimini 2016