An Illustrated Siddur from Ulm on its Way to Italy (1450-1453)

The Biblioteca Palatina in Parma preserves a Siddur, which according to colophon, was copied in Ulm in 1450 and received additions three years later in Treviso. Assumingly it was brought from Swabia to northern Italy by a patron how migrated to the South.

The manuscript is richly illustrated, but its illuminations were never studied in depth. Their style indicates that they were made in Swabia, and scholars suggested that they were the work by a Christian artist. However, certain typically Italian features can be discerned, an observation that suggests that we deal with a Jewish artist migrating from the German lands to Italy, as did the manuscript’s patron.

The proposed paper offers an analysis of the image cycle against the background of these questions and presents the book as an artifact that owes its appearance to migration history and cultural exchange between Italian cities and the German lands, on the one hand, and Jewish and Christian visual culture, on the other.