Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the Friends of the Netherlands Interuniversity Institute ofArt History (NIKI) in Florence for their financial support of the research carried out for this publication. Thanks are also due to the director of the NIKI, Michael W. Kwakkelstein, for proposing this project to the Friends and for his comments on earlier versions of this edition. We also thank him for providing hospitality and research facilities and for including this book in the series ‘NIKI Studies in Netherlandish-Italian Art History’, published by Brill Publishers. The staff of the NIKI, in particular Gert Jan van der Sman, Ilaria Masi and Lex Kuil, facilitated our research in every possible way. The last-mentioned acquitted himself admirably of the task of procuring the photographs for the illustrations. We also thank the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen for putting research facilities and funds at our disposal.
Bram de Klerck helped to edit the Introduction and selected the illustrations. Andrea Paoletti went through part of the footnotes to the transcription and provided us with some valuable additions to them. Stefano Ugo Baldassarri was helpful in identifying errors in the author’s handling of Pliny’s text in the first volume of the Codex. Teresa de Robertis gave generously of her time to help us compare the manuscript of the Codex with the marginal notes it contains, in our efforts to ascertain whether those notes were written in the same hand as the Codex. Lorenzo Bartoli graciously provided us with typescripts of some of his still-unpublished articles on the relationship between the Codex and Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentarii. Scott Nethersole was so kind as to share his thoughts on the history of the transmission of the manuscript of Ghiberti’s Commentarii.
We thank the staff of the Medici Archive Project, in particular Maurizio Arfaioli, for their help in analysing Bernardo Vecchietti’s handwriting and comparing it with that of the author of the Codex. For the same reason, we are grateful to Michaela Sambucco and Piero Scapecchi of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. We are likewise indebted to the Archivio di Stato of Florence for giving us full access to its holdings of Bernardo Vecchietti’s correspondence.
Jan L. de Jong pointed out to us that the author of the Codex is a very early example of a ‘tourist’ writing about contemporary art in Rome, in contrast to those who merely described the art of antiquity to be found there or the places that housed relics. Alfonso Mirto was immediately willing to comply with our request to transcribe for us the eighteenth-century catalogue entries on the Codex in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. Diane Webb went above and beyond the role of the translator, and we are grateful for her observations and comments. Finally, we are greatly indebted to the first, anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for checking the English so carefully in Appendix 2.