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Kleinodienbuch der Herzogin Anna von Bayern = Jewel book of the Duchess Anna of Bavaria / Hans Mielich, Bound by Pat Sweet

This little book is certainly one of the gems of this collection!

It features gilded snakeskin covers with metal embellishments, along with a beautiful box with a descriptive booklet. It also includes images of paintings depicting the jewels of the Duchess of Bavaria. These paintings were commissioned in 1552 from Hans Mielich, the court painter of Duke Albert V of Bavaria, and were meant as an inventory of the Duke and Duchesses jewel collection. The elaborate manuscript inventory has survived long after much of the jewelry was lost, and now resides in the Bavarian State Library. (From Pat Sweets description of the project)

She also writes:

I have tried, in my presentation of the Jewel Book, to reproduce in miniature some sense of the outrageous Renaissance ostentation that makes the original such a brilliant and worldly example of wretched excess.“

"The book is bound in gilded snakeskin with a beaded and embellished front panel of celadon snakeskin. The tri-fold box is bound in a gold on black arabesque pattern Indian silkscreened paper with a raised rectangle on the front bound in a textured Japanese metallic gold paper. The interior of the box is lined in a Japanese chiyogami feather print.” –Colophon, in booklet

Library has number 5 of 10

Scans of the original manuscript from the Bavarian State Library can be viewed onlinehere (Two examples below, highly recommended, the pics of the printed pages in the mini cannot do justice to details in the original paintings)

^Both of these from Kleinodienbuch der Herzogin Anna von Bayern - BSB Cod.icon. 429

You can learn more about Pat Sweet on her website: https://www.bopressminiaturebooks.com/

–Diane R., Special Collections Graduate Student

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