Francesco da Lucca officiale estense

The present contribution continues research begun in 1932 by Giovanni Mercati, who was the first to begin assembling a dossier of the manuscript attestations for a certain Francesco of Lucca (15th cent.). This individual, who was responsible for a series of «visti» placed in numerous Greek and Latin manuscripts, was otherwise unknown. In the decades that followed other scholars added to the number of manuscripts carrying the «visto» of Francesco of Lucca, but without arriving at a historical contextualization of his activity. This contribution reconstructs for the first time the activity of this individual in the Ferrara of the dukes Borso d’Este. In so doing it makes use not only of historiographical sources that were hitherto neglected, but also of documents preserved in the State Archives of Modena. In an appendix, an updated list is provided for the manuscripts carrying the «visto» of Francesco of Lucca, with the removal of some erroneous attributions to his hand that have been made in recent years.