Library Special Collections Blog
Upcoming Lecture: Parallel Lines Never Meet: Dolphins and Anchors and Aldus/Book Historians and Numismatists and Roman Coins
This denarius is a companion piece to the Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection of publications by Aldo Manuzio, his family, and imitators and the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Early Italian Printing, both held in the Department of Special Collections of UCLA Library Special Collections. The Aldine collection at UCLA has become the foremost collection of these works in North America. Parallel Lines Never Meet: Dolphins and Anchors and Aldus/Book Historians and Numismatists and Roman Coins, a lecture at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library given by Terry Belanger (Founding Director, Rare Book School, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia). Co-sponsored by Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections. Thursday, February 9, 4:00 p.m. Reservations open until February 3rd. Please fill out a reservation here In 1501, the celebrated Venetian scholar-publisher Aldus Manutius first used the motif of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor as his firm's device or logo, and he subsequently employed it many times on title pages and colophons - as did a variety of piratical imitators, publishers who also appropriated Aldus's handsome italic typefaces and convenient octavo formats. The dolphin-and-anchor motif was later adopted by William Pickering in nineteenth-century London and Nelson Doubleday in twentieth-century New York, and it remains perhaps the best known of all publishers' devices. Erasmus tells us that Aldus derived the anchor-and-dolphin image from a first-century AD Roman silver coin, incorrectly attributing it to the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. In fact, the anchor-and-dolphin device was used only on silver denarii successively issued by Vespasian's two sons, the Emperors Titus (79-81) and Domitian (81-96). Following Erasmus, historians of the book have ever since consistently misattributed the anchor-and-dolphin denarius, which they tend to exalt as one of the most celebrated of all ancient coins, comparable in importance to the 30 pieces of silver and the widow's mite. Numismatists take a different view: the coin has never been of much interest to students of Imperial Roman coins, who almost never mention the Aldine connection. Terry Belanger's illustrated lecture, accompanied by a three-dimensional handout, is a case study in the way that different scholarly disciplines can sometimes fail to recognize the utility of evidence easily available from fields outside their own immediate areas of interest.
Elmer Belt, Collector of Ideas Exhibit
In 1961, Los Angeles urologist and bibliophile Dr. Elmer Belt donated to UCLA his magnificent collection of books and materials about Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance. A fiftieth anniversary tribute to the collector and his Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana is on display in the lobby gallery of the Department of Special Collections (Charles E. Young Library, A-level) through January 6. Highlights of the exhibit include Luca Pacioli’s De divina proportione of 1509, which contains Leonardo’s perspective drawings of the regular solids and his elegant roman capital alphabet; Roberto Valturio’s De re militari of 1483, extensively referred to by Leonardo in his notebooks; and the 1550 edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ piu eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori…, the first modern book of art history, in which Leonardo’s life figures prominently. Elmer Belt, M.D. (1893-1980) moved from Chicago to California at a young age and never looked back. His dedication to book collecting emerged in high school in Los Angeles with the dime novels of Thomas Bird Mosher. It was reinforced in medical school, when a history of medicine class assignment at Berkeley with George W. Corner sparked an interest in the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Following a residency with physician and noted bibliophile Harvey Cushing in Boston, Dr. Belt opened a urological practice back in Los Angeles in the 1920s and purchased the first facsimile edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. Belt recruited antiquarian bookseller Jacob (Jake) Zeitlin and art historian Kate Steinitz to help him build the foremost research collection in the world of books about all facets of Leonardo’s works and the Italian Renaissance. Although Vinciana was his core interest, Belt immersed himself in the ideas and accomplishments of several other intellectual forebears and contemporaries, and built renowned collections around nursing educator Florence Nightingale, neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, and his own friend, the writer/activist Upton Sinclair. Elmer Belt and his wife Ruth spread their tremendous involvement throughout Los Angeles but focused their passion, influence, and philanthropy on UCLA. This culminated in the 1961 gift of the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana, whose volumes include more than 70 incunables or books produced during the fifteenth-century infancy of printing with movable type.
(Above) Reviewing the 1961 gift, from left to right: Rosanna Pedretti; Vinciana librarian Kate Steinitz (1889-1975); Carlo Pedretti (now UCLA Professor of Art History, emeritus); Dr. Elmer Belt; and Leonardo scholar Ladislao Reti (1901-1973). For information about using items, see: Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana. Twenty-eight books from the Vinciana collection, focusing on editions of the Treatise on Painting, are digitized and available through the Internet Archive. Books from Dr. Belt’s Florence Nightingale Collection, donated to the Biomedical Library in 1958 in honor of School of Nursing founding dean Lulu Wolf Hassenplug, also are online through the Internet Archive. In 1976, Dr. Belt described the inspiration for his bookplate (at top): “[W]e selected the little quick sketch by Leonardo of an artist looking through a peephole at a transparency upon which he is tracing the lines of a three dimensional object seen beyond the screen upon which he is drawing. This semi-scientific instrument in active use seemed to me to express so exactly Leonardo’s approach and method of thinking in general that I adopted it as a bookplate for our Leonardo da Vinci Library.” Russell Johnson and Jane Carpenter UCLA Library Special Collections
