Girolamo dai Libri

In Verona the name dai Libri, of the books, was a description of the family trade. Girolamo's grandfather Stefano was a scribe and decorator of manuscripts, his father Francesco a well-known illuminator, and Girolamo learned to paint on the page at home. A register of 1492 gives his age as 18, which is how his birth is placed around 1474.

For much of his life he painted choir books, the huge volumes monks sang from together at services, many of them for the Olivetan monks of Santa Maria in Organo in Verona, the same community that gave him some of his early altarpieces. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of artists, counted him among the greatest illuminators of his time and singled out the beauty of his landscapes. He kept working at both scales, from painted initials a few centimetres high to altarpieces more than two metres tall, and his single leaves and cuttings are now scattered as far as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.