Prediche del reuerendo padre fra Gieronimo da Ferrara per tutto l’anno nuouamente con somma diligentia ricorrette.

The sermons were collected by a stenographer, the notary Lorenzo Violi, a fervent follower of Savonarola who faithfully transcribed the friar’s preaching. In 1496, in a heated political climate, after the Pope had ordered Savonarola to preach no longer, the Signoria, on 11 February, in defiance of the Papacy, had invited the friar to hold the Lenten sermons in the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. On Ash Wednesday of 1496, the friar had ascended the Cathedral’s pulpit with the aim of obeying God alone.

The volume on the 1496 sermons was printed in Venice by Ottaviano Scoto the Younger. The printer, son of Amedeo Scoto, directed publication after 1533, and this is one of those cases in which the work was done along with his brother Brandino; the Scoto brothers were the publishers, but with the economic collaboration of their partner Giovanni Antonio da Volpini. The frontispiece, observing the pulpit from which Savonarola is preaching, in fact clearly shows the printer’s mark with the double cross and tripartite heart, and the two brothers’ initials (B and O) along with the letter S.

The specimen bears an ownership stamp of the Santa Maria Novella library, and an ancient, handwritten note, bearing witness to the provenance from the Florentine convent that was the Dominican order’s beating heart; in this case as well, we can suppose that the cinquecentina joined the Uffizi’s holdings after the Napoleonic repression.

The volume was originally bound along with the Predica dello amore divino sopra la passione del nostro Signore Jesu Christo.