Girolamo Savonarola: Piety, Prophesy and Politics in Renaissance Florence

Red Room

Jan Sobota
Girolamo Savonarola: Piety, Prophesy and Politics in Renaissance Florence
Broadside, 1994
Number 75 out of an edition of 100.

The production of this broadside to celebrate a ninety-nine-item exhibition in The Elizabeth Perkins Prothro Galleries initiated by special collections curator Isaac Gewirtz and carried out by director Valerie Hotchkiss, was timed to coincide with a meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. The red text was typeset and printed by W. Thomas Taylor in Austin. The title was printed from a plate in black, not on the Ashendene Royal Albion located in the Bridwell printery as indicated, but on the smaller Albion press built by Frederick Ullmer (1827–1899) on the east wall of the red reading room. Tables and floor were lined with plastic and the reading room became a print shop with Jan Sobota, director of the Bridwell Library book conservation laboratory, instructing participants in setting paper, inking, and pulling their impressions.

The exhibition curated by Italian Renaissance scholar Donald Weinstein drew almost entirely from two collections at Bridwell Library related to proto-reformer Girolomo Savonarola. The Selecman Savonarola Collection was established by Jackie Selecman to honor the memory of her husband Bishop Charles C. Selecman, third president of SMU, and includes almost seventy tracts and other works dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The Mario Ferrara Library was purchased in 1980 to supplement the Selecman holdings. Twelve hundred titles in the Ferrara library make Bridwell one of the largest repositories of works by and about Savonarola.