The initial C illustrates a response for the Office of the Dead: Credo quod redemptor meus vivit et novissimo die terra resurrecturus sum, et in carne mea videbo Deum, Salvatorem meum ("I believe that my Redeemer lives, and that on the last day I shall rise from the earth, and in my flesh I shall see God, my Savior").Emerging from cracks in the ground with their hands clasped in prayer, the dead gaze up to Christ, who raises his hand in judgment. Decorated by Lorenzo Monaco, the preeminent early fifteenth-century Florentine painter and illuminator, the initial comes from an antiphonary made for Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence. The choir books for this monastic community, to which the artist belonged, represent the crowning achievement of manuscript illumination in early Renaissance Florence, admired by the sixteenth-century biographer Giorgio Vasari and the Medici pope Leo X (r. 1513–21), who contemplated taking them for Saint Peter’s in Rome. The penwork in the border was added later.
