Miniatura or the Art of Limning - Couverture rigide

From the INTRODUCTION.
In the year 1735: seven carts trundled along the road from Norwich to Oxford carrying the great collection of books and manuscripts bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by Thomas Tanner, Bishop of St. Asaph. In one of these carts was the manuscript of Edward Norgate's 'Miniatura', bearing on its fly-leaf, in the tremulous writing of old age, the signature of its previous owner, Sir John Holland, and his inscription, a common one in seventeenth-century books of recipes, Secreta mea mihi. The manuscript comprises forty-four folio pages containing a treatise on 'Miniatura or the Art of Limning', followed by nine folio pages of recipes for colours and perfumes. The water-mark of the paper on which the treatise is written is an elaborate 'pot mark', closely resembling in design the marks on papers of 1634 and 1643 preserved in the Town Hall, Rochester. The manuscript was catalogued, five years after its arrival, by Thomas Toynbee of Balliol, and was entered again in the fuller catalogue, made in 186o by the Rev. A. Hackman, as 'Tann. 326,Chartaceus, in folio, ff. 4.8, sec. XVII; possedit Johannes Holland, eq. aur. Miniatura or the art of limning by E. Norgate'.
The full importance of this manuscript was perhaps unrecognized, until the appearance, in 1904, of Dr. Williamson's History of Portrait Miniatures. While making some researches for Dr. Williamson, the present writer found that several manuscript treatises, preserved at the British Museum and elsewhere, had a close relationship with Norgate's 'Miniatura', and that the Bodleian manuscript (to be called hereafter Tann. 326, for convenience of reference) was apparently the earliest and most important version of the treatise in its final form as written by Norgate within the last two years of his life. A few extracts from Tann. 326 were made somewhat hurriedly for Dr. Williamson while his book was in the press, and I am glad of the opportunity now given by the Oxford University Press of publishing for the first time a complete transcript of this valuable work, and of throwing some fresh light on its close kinship with the other manuscripts in question.....