Scope and content:

The Belt Library is a collection of manuscripts and printed books pertaining to Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance. Assembled by Dr. Belt, the library was moved from his office to the UCLA campus in 1961, and to its present location within the Art Library in the Dickson Art Center in 1966. Portions of the collection remained with Dr. Belt, among them the fifteenth-century French lectionary described in Bond and Faye, Supplement, p.16. The library houses a collection of incunabula and a group of renaissance manuscripts. Besides the materials included below, the Belt Library possesses a seventeenth-century manuscript containing an anonymous treatise in Italian, Modo di fortificare (Belt 72). On the structure and history of the library, see F.L. Finger, Catalogue of the Incunabula in the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana (Los Angeles, 1971), and Max Marmor, “The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana,” The Book Collector, vol.38 (1989) pp.321-342.

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