JACOPINO DA REGGIO

Italian illuminator. He is recorded in many documents relating to the copying of books, and he signed the decoration of a copy of Gratian’s Decretals (Rome, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS. Vat. lat. 1375) to which several illuminators contributed. If this signature is accepted as belonging not to a stationer who had the manuscript illustrated, but to the principal illuminator who organized the work and was himself responsible for the most important decoration, then Jacopino can be identified as the most important Bolognese master working in the Byzantine style at the end of the 13th century, and the illuminator of the Bible of Clement VII (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. lat. 18).

Compared with the equally Byzantine-influenced but more lively narrative style of the Girona Master who illuminated the Bible of Charles V (Girona, Biblioteca Capitolare), Jacopino evolved an extremely courtly style in which Byzantine elements are combined with decorative features derived from Limoges enamels and others that suggest knowledge of the Isaac Master at Assisi. His illustrations tend to be included as small pictures, rather than being in a freer relationship with the rubrics and script. The stylistic tendencies of his collaborators suggest that the Paris Bible, another in London (British Library, Add. MS. 18720), the Book of Psalms in Bible D.II.3 (Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria) and probably Aristotle’s Opera (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. lat. 6297) all precede Jacopino’s work on the Decretals (MS. Vat. lat. 1375).

Other work by his collaborators on this manuscript can be dated after 1300. Another manuscript of the Decretals in the Vatican (Rome, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS. Pal. lat. 629) and a Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. fond. Smith-Lesouëf 21) are possibly even later works.