Apocalyptic animals in the Johannes Lichtenberger’s Pronosticatio and its Italian translation

This article examines an Italian translation of the Pronosticatio by Johannes Lichtenberger (originally written in Latin and printed in Germany for the first time in 1488) preserved in the manuscript London Wellcome Library 425, dated 1504. MS 425 contains nearly the complete text, with the exception of a couple of paragraphs and the xylographic apparatus; here we are concerned just with the Italian version of Lichtenberger’s work in which, both in the text and the images (which are presented here thanks to the wide circulation of this text distributed by Italian publishers in 14 printed editions), more than fifty different animals are mentioned. Focusing on this concentration of animals, we will offer a reading of the narrative role of the animal within the prophetic genre, accompanied by some hypotheses regarding what a 1504 reader (the date is contained in the manuscript itself) could have thought and in which way he may have interpreted this kind of text.