The Library of Michelangelo: A Proposal Regarding a Volume Held at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania

This essay focuses on a volume preserved at the library of the Kislak Center, Rare Books and Manuscripts (University of Pennsylvania) possesses in the fund Francis Campbell Macauley (fIC.D2352.Ei529t) a volume which gathers together the vernacularization of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia by Gian Giorgio Trissino, published in 1529, and the Prose della volgar lingua by Pietro Bembo, in the 1525 editio princeps. The two volumes bear material traces of their ownership by Leonardo Buonarroti, grandson and universal heir of Michelangelo, and by his descendants Michelangelo the Younger and Filippo the Archaeologist. The study of the different handwritten notes on the pages of the volumes, of their content characteristics, and of their chronology; and an in-depth analysis on the biographies of Michelangelo and Leonardo Buonarroti allows us to hypothesize that the first owner of the two treatises was the great artist himself.