[split] Taccola spillover thread

[Koen G]

Thanks, Ed, that's very handy. 

On the various copy books, I recommend You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Elizabeth Merrill. On Francesco's Codicetto, she writes:

The signature authorship displayed in the Codicetto comes with a notable caveat
in that, as has long been recognised, Francesco relied extensively on Taccola.
Almost all of the drawings packed into the first half of the tiny manuscript are
clearly copies after Taccola, taken primarily from books i and ii of his De Ingeneis. [KG: we are interested in any spread of book III-IV instead]
Compiled between 1427 and 1441, De Ingeneis was initiated as a formal treatise on
technical design and infrastructure, but over time and with the sporadic addition
of notes and drawings, it evolved into a more jumbled book of ideas. Although
it is not entirely certain how or where Francesco gained access to these fecund
manu scripts, it is likely that they were held within the Sapienza of the Studio of
Siena, where Taccola had served as camerarius. The close links that existed among
the Commune of Siena, the Studio and the Spedale assured the continual flow of
information between these institutions, so it is quite plausible that an individual
employed by the Spedale or the Commune would have been able to reference an
authoritative work like De Ingeneis. Drawings added to a final folio of Taccola’s
manuscript offer evidence of the book’s study by other practitioners and have, in
fact, been attributed to Francesco. Still, that few images in the Codicetto are strict
Taccola reproductions warrants emphasis. Francesco emulated Taccola’s graphic
models, but also notably improved on them, rendering them in a more lucid, concise
manner.

What's interesting here is that they confirm, for books I and II, the kind of access pattern we are also hypothesizing for books III-IV: availability to the university's visitors. It is possible that the prettier MS with books III-IV had already been removed from the library by the time people like Francesco got to them.

Reading a bit further, I notice that Merill only mentions the 766 MS twice, both in the descriptions of images:

   

Does this mean the dedication MS with books III-IV was available for copying? I just went through the Dresden copy again and it certainly does not include the bridge (mostly machines, really). Maybe the fountain drawing was also found elsewhere.