Holy Writ

Suppose you open your holiday gifts a couple of weeks from now and there’s a letter signed, “Your Michelangelo.” Only, you don’t know anybody by that name.

Don’t tear it up, not if it looks old. It could be a copy of a small assortment of ancient letters, illuminated manuscripts, city maps and celestial charts made by some of history’s most famous people. Their works are being reproduced and sold to the public in cooperation with the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Vatican Library in Rome.

Three years ago, 1451 International, an Irvine-based art publishing company, received a license to reproduce the library’s holdings, which amount to one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the world. Most of the world has never seen the Vatican’s collections, however--the library is closed to the public.

The company was formed especially for this project and takes its name from the year that the library was founded by Pope Nicholas V for clergy and scholars, who are still the only ones allowed to use it, with few exceptions. So far, 1451 International has reproduced about 100 works, a selection of which will be on view at the Patricia Faure Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica beginning Saturday.

“Your Michelangelo” penned his letter around 1550, demanding that his superiors stop sending him second-rate lime. He was preparing the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel for what would become perhaps the most famous frescoes ever made. He wanted complete control, no matter who had other plans. “I implore you, from now onwards not to accept anything which does not serve our purposes,” he wrote, “even if it comes from heaven itself.”

A love letter in the collection reveals Henry VIII baring his soul to Anne Boleyn in about 1528. Torrid, treacly, and sinister between the lines, it begins, “Darling” and ends with an intimate “HR.” The trouble is that Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon at the time, and the last days of his romance with Anne were not pretty. Soon after he married her, he had her beheaded.

To make the more unusual works in the library available, Doree Dunlap, who oversees 1451’s art publications, included a group of poems, “In Praise of the Cross,” by Hrabanus Maurus, a 9th century German monk. He illuminated each one with sacred symbols so that people who could not read might enjoy them. The German monk’s spare but richly colored designs are among the most contemporary looking in the collection. “I was bowled over by how Minimalist and Reductivist his work is,” says Dunlap, who taught art history and studio art at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa before she joined 1451.

The small Irvine company gained rights directly from the Vatican after a sub-license arrangement it held got tangled in a lawsuit. Once the suit was settled, the Vatican formed a separate agreement with 1451, which now serves as an umbrella company that produces some merchandise on its own and subcontracts other products. Items range from prints to stationery, antique coins, posters and apparel including T-shirts. “We were in the right place at the right time,” said Guillermo Marrero, the San Diego County-based lawyer who negotiated the new terms.

Dunlap calls on scholars in various fields to help select the images to reproduce. The hardest part is deciding what to choose. The library houses more than a million printed works, much of it organized in an antiquated system. Illuminated manuscripts dating as early as the second century are cataloged on 3-by-5-inch index cards rather than in a computerized database.

“The collection is about the world,” Dunlap said of the holdings she has seen so far. “Pope Nicholas was a humanist who lived during the Renaissance.” Not exclusively religious, she said, the collection “is secular, multicultural and all about the world.” That is what she wants the 1451 print collection to reflect. She has researched manuscripts from Aztec, Native American, Chinese and Japanese cultures.

Working with the Vatican is a slow, precise business. Once the 1451 team chooses images to reprint, the library staff makes a transparency of the original and sends it to Irvine. The images are then scanned into digital files and stored on a computer. Proofs are sent to Rome, where they are compared with the originals and corrected until they are exact. Then they can be reproduced in a range of forms, from limited-edition prints--such as those in the Faure Gallery exhibition, priced from $950 to $2,500--to unlimited numbers of posters and postcards.

“The Vatican wants the art to reach everyone,” Dunlap said, “whether they can afford a fine print or a postcard.”

Dunlap expects to produce another 200 images next year, and 1451 plans to arrange an exhibition of originals from the library that will travel to California, among other states.

For more information about 1451 International and how to purchase products, visit its Web site at https://www.1451.com. The Patricia Faure Gallery is at 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479.