Justinian I, Digestorum, Lyon, 1581, contemporary Parisian olive morocco gilt for Pietro Duodo

JUSTINIAN I. Digestorum, seu pandectarum pars tertia: quae de rebus creditis est (Pars quarta: de pignoribus et hypothecis). Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1581

Two parts of Justinian’s Digest from a set of seven printed by Rouillé in 1581, in a fine binding made for Pietro Duodo, while he was in Paris as Venetian envoy, as part of his travelling library. As with many other collectors, his books were colour coded, though it is usually stated that law books were bound in red, and olive green (as here) for general books. His bindings are sometimes attributed to Clovis Ève, and more recently to the Atelier of the Second Palmette or of the S fermé.

The small format of these bindings for Duodo show that they were made as a travelling library, and more than 160 volumes are recorded, which were housed in a custom-made chest. Duodo was in Paris in 1594-1597, at the court of Henri IV, and presumably commissioned the bindings then. The books seem to have returned to Paris, where they appeared on the market in the late eighteenth century, and only attributed to Duodo more than a century later. It has recently been suggested that Duodo’s library influenced the English princes Henry and Charles, who both owned similar travelling libraries, and who met Duodo soon after he arrived in London in 1603 (Francesca Galligan, “Small format books and portable sets: the context of the travelling library of Charles I”, in Seventeenth-century libraries: problems and perspectives, Leiden: Brill, 2023).