MATTEO DI SER CAMBIO
(active 1377-1427 in Perugia)

Gregory IX: Decretals

1370s
Manuscript (Ms. 488)
Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna

This manuscript in Ravenna is composite. The original was made in the 1340s and contains the text of the Decretals of Gregory IX. (Decretals are letters of the pope that formulate decisions in ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church. Pope Gregory IX ordered in 1230 his chaplain and confessor, St. Raymond of Pennafort, a Dominican, to form a new canonical collection destined to replace all former collections.) The first two leaves were added later, in the 1370s. They contain tables of consanguinity and comments on the Fourth Book of the Decretals.

The original manuscript is ornamented with decorated initials and scenes with figures. The decoration was made in Perugia in the 1340s. The miniatures on the first two leaves were executed by Matteo di Ser Cambio, an artist who worked in Perugia in whom Sienese and Paduan influences are merged.

Folio 4 is decorated with a miniature showing the table of consanguinity. At the centre of a green, three-dimensional grid, a large ancestral figure is depicted with a tree-shaped schema before him, which outlines the grades of relationship in which marriage was forbidden without ecclesiastical dispensation.