Non omnis moriar. Intellectual and political celebration of Malatesta Novello in his Libraria Domini

Between 1450 and 1454 Malatesta Novello, lord of Cesena (Italy, Emilia-Romagna) built a library in the cloister of the convent of San Francesco. Today it is an extraordinary witness of the fifteenth-century humanistic culture. The scriptorium created by Novello produced more than one hundred and twenty codices, which made up the book collection of the new library. Among the volumes commissioned by the lord of the city, the manuscripts S.XV.1, S.XV.2 and S.XVII.3 stand out, containing Plutarch's Vitae parallelae. These codices are richly decorated with the portraits of illustrious men of which the Greek writer tells. Among these miniatures there is the representation of the leader and politician Marco Crasso, represented with the face of Malatesta Novello. This is an emblematic example of the desire for emulation of the great lords of the Italian Renaissance in the leaders and heroes of classical Greek and Latin antiquity. These manuscripts testify to the will of the lord of Cesena to be identified with Marcus Crassus, proof of the fact that in the Renaissance imagination the heroes of Plutarch had replaced the ideal of the political model provided by the "good and just king" of biblical tradition. The portrait is linked to man's desire to eternalize himself, not to die completely (non omnis moriar) and to impress his virtue, social role, and work in the conscience of his contemporaries and in the memory of posterity. In this case, this is achieved by following a common practice in this historical period, that is, using art and literature as tools of political affirmation and personal and family glorification. And the chosen style is the one that recalls classical antiquity, a style linked in the collective imagination to the political, economic and military splendor of Greece and Rome.