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Eugenio Donadoni, Junior Specialist in the London Books & Manuscripts department, detects contemporary elements in the story behind a breathtaking illuminated prayerbook.

"È nato un altro Lucifero" – "another Lucifer is born". Thus Pope Nicholas IV is said to have commented on the birth of Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1444, and the young Duke swiftly set himself to live up to the epithet. A shrewd politician, an intellectual and a patron of the arts but also a tyrant given to violence and excesses of the flesh, his ruthless womanising and despotic exuberance were matched by his cultured taste for splendour and lavish display. The megalomaniac pomp of his person is expressed quite splendidly in his imposing prayerbook, which forms part of the sale of the Arcana Collection, part III, at King Street on 6 July. Sforza’s Great Hours, illuminated by the Ippolita Master during the last years of Galeazzo Maria’s reign and life, is a paradoxical volume in which the expression of Christian devotion plays second fiddle to the identity of the owner: the delicate and delightful angels gaze down in worshipful adoration at Galeazzo Maria’s coat of arms (prominently placed at the foot of the first opening) while the historiated initial depicting the Annunciation is surrounded by his heraldic emblems.

Present-day readers of the manuscript can savour the irony of the presence, in the one small section of the book meant solely for Galeazzo Maria’s personal use, of prayers specifically to save him from his enemies and sudden death. Irony, because on the 26 December 1476, in the church of Santo Stefano in Milan, the young Duke was brutally murdered at the hands of Carlo Visconti, Gerolamo Olgiati and Giovanni Andrea Lampugnani.  Revenge, murder, luxury and profligate living. Between his dissolute life and his sensationally violent end, Galeazzo Maria’s story is the stuff of HBO shows and Hollywood fiction, and indeed to this day tales of his life and death continue to feed public interest: readers familiar with the Xbox may have spotted that the plot to kill Galeazzo Maria forms the premise of Assassin’s Creed: Lineage, the prelude to Assassin’s Creed II, one of the most successful computer games of recent years.