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STATUTES OF THE MOLESKIN ART OF CHIERI
The original manuscript
The library of the Chieri Foundation for Textiles has come into the
possession of another important volume: the photographic reproduction of
the original manuscript of the University of Moleskin, containing the
Statutes and the registered minutes from the very start of its
foundation, which took place in 1482. The original manuscript, which was
for a few centuries thought to have been lost, has been found in the
archives of Count Balbiano of Aramengo, to whom it belongs, where
probably it arrived through complicated inheritance successions or
marriage dowry.
The manuscript is in thick paper, coarse, not watermarked, which was
ordinarily used for sub-alpine notary books of the time. It is made up
of 135 pages, leather-bound in brown, held on the spine through lanyards,
i.e. fine leather strips, and is in a fair state of preservation. It
contains the Statutes that the Major Council of Chieri ordered to be
published and the compliance to be imposed. It was on the 18th of August
1482, the day the Moleskin Art was born, that marked the transition from
the Chieri textile manufacture of typically artisan style to a proto
industrial form with a character more evolved and organised.
The entries stopped suddenly on the 21st July 1591 and since then, for
various centuries, the whereabouts of the manuscript was unknown, up to
the finding in the middle of the XX century. The reason is unknown,
perhaps with the sudden death of notary Visca who was responsible for
the entries, the manuscript was forgotten in his archives, when, in
1715, it was endowed as a marriage dowry to Counts Baronis of Santena,
when the last descendant, Margherita, married Carlo Amedeo. At the
extinction of this family, with the noble woman Luisa who in the XIX
century married count Giulio Cesare Balbiano of Aramengo, the manuscript
changed hands again and became part of the Balbiano Archive, and from
here, fortunately, has become common historic patrimony. When the volume
was recovered an extract was published, with an introductory study of
Anna Maria Nada Patrone, with the title “Statutes of the moleskin art of
Chieri”, published in 1966, which is part of the library of the Textile
Foundation, but the most interesting aspect of the volume now
photographed, that is at the disposal of the experts in the premises of
the Foundation, is the reproduction in natural scale of the hand written
entries, with different calligraphic styles of the writers, the writings
are in chancery cursive, little refined, low Latin, of a shabby
syntactic and lexical structure, containing Piedmontese Latinised terms.
The realisation of this work has been possible thanks to the courtesy of
count Dr. Giuseppe Balbiano of Aramengo who has loaned the volume for
the photographs made by the architect Diego Surace. The printing was
done by Integrafica, with the binding by Artigiani del libro, both from
Chieri.
Page of the original manuscript and
reproduced page |
