Page:Historical essay on the art of bookbinding (IA 0130ARTO).pdf/9

Rh covered with precious stones, and Christ died naked before the gate of his temple;” but the exhortations of profound philosophers and austere monks availed little in the growing passion for superb books. Zonaras, the Byzantian historian, says in his “Annals” that Belisarius found among the treasures of Gelimer, King of the Vandals, the books of the Scriptures, “glittering with gold and precious stones.” A similar binding, two plates of gold ornamented with colored stones and antique cameos, is of the Greek Scriptures, which Theodelinda, Queen of the Lombards, gave, fifty or sixty years after the death of Belisarius, to that cathedral of Monza which possesses the famous Iron Crown, mainly of gold, but with a thin band of iron, said to have been hammered from a nail of the true cross.

The celebrated copy of the Pandects of Justinian, which is to be found in the Laurentian library of Florence, is of the sixth or seventh century. The volume is a folio bound with wooden boards, covered with red velvet and ornamented with silver corners. It was not known to Dibdin, who says in the Eighth Dialogue of his “Bibliographical Decameron” that there are no specimens of binding in velvet before the fourteenth century, at which time it is expressly