Legend Aurea

The work had a wide diffusion and a substantial follow-up until the 17th century. They survive about 1400 manuscript codes of the work, witnessing its enormous diffusion in the Middle Ages, only lower than the Bible, and its great cultural influence. The Legend Aurea was soon translated into vulgar. For the Middle Ages there were ten editions in Italian, eighteen in high-German, seven in German bass, seventeen in French, four in English, three in Czech, ten in Dutch. Equally large was the success of print versions, with forty-nine versions between 1470 and 1500, twenty-eight between 1500 and 1530 and thirteen between 1531 and 1560.^[1]

Only in the eighteenth century, with historiographic studies of the Babylonian fathers, the entire literary genre of agiography was discredited and with it also the Legend Aurea It was forgotten.

The most recent critical edition is the one published in 1998 (which was published in 2007 with Italian translation and commentary on individual chapters) by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni. The text set by Graesse (Lipsia 1846) was used earlier.

• 
  Incunabolo of 1478, for Johannes Zainer

The work belongs to the genus of agiography. The author collected in a saint organized according to the liturgical year the lives of more than one hundred and fifty saints, preferring the ancient saints, but without neglecting its age. The lives of the saints are intersected by some thirty chapters dedicated to the main cryptological, Marian and liturgical festivals, plus some stories related to the Legend of the True Cross.

According to Jacques Le Goff, the originality of the work consists in the ability to intertwine liturgical time (annual cycle) with that linear one of the succession of saints (holy time, as the saints themselves become markers of time) and with that eschatological one, in which humanity is heading towards the Universal Judgement. In summary, "our Dominican wants to show how only Christianity has been able to structure and sanctify the time of human life to lead humanity to salvation".^[2]

The sources used were mainly the legendary Dominicans Giovanni di Mailly and Bartolomeo da Trento. The method followed was that ofabbreviated.

The Legend is composed of more than two hundred chapters, one for every saint. The first 182 chapters were drafted by Jacopo da Varazze, while the remaining were the work of continuations.

Many artists inspired themselves to Legend Aurea for their works. Among these were Giotto with the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Piero della Francesca with the Stories of the True Cross in the basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, and Vittore Carpaccio with the Stories of Sant'Orsola (along with one Pass of the saint), cycle of telegraphs commissioned by the Venetian devotional school appointed as the martyr for their chapel (now preserved at the Gallerie dell'Accademia; for the school the work also constituted the reference source for the editing of the Cursor Mundi).

• Legenda aurea, translation by Nicolò Malermi, Venice, Nicolas Jenson, 1476.
• Legenda aurea, translation by Nicolò Malermi, Milan, Ulrich Scinzenzeler, 1497.
• Legenda aurea, translation by Nicolò Malermi, Venice, Bartholomeo di Zani da Portese, 1499.
• (THE) Legenda aurea, Leipzig, Librariae Arnoldianae, 1850.
• Legenda aurea, translation by Alessandro Vitale Brovarone et al., Turin, Einaudi, 2007, ISBN 978-88-06-18322-6.
• Legenda aurea, translation by Francesco Stella et al., Florence and Milan, Sismel and Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2007, ISBN 978-88-8450-245-2.
• Legendary aurea, translation by Cecilia Lisi, Florence, Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 2022, ISBN 978-88-89264-16-4.

• (FR) Jacques Le Goff, To the recherche du temps sacré, Paris, Perrin, 2011, ISBN 9782262033927, SBN UBO3909581. Italian translation: The sacred time of man, Bari, Laterza, 2012, ISBN 978-88-420-9994-9, SBN UM10129715.