Amidst the splendid scenery of the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini organized, on 14 and 15 October 2019, the international conference “Multa Renascentur. Tammaro De Marinis, Scholar, Bibliophile, Antiquarian, Collector” in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the ‘Grand Old Man of Italian Bookselling’: Tammaro De Marinis, not only one of the major antiquarian book dealers of the twentieth century, but also an extremely refined collector and a renowned scholar, as his monumental and still highly esteemed works La Biblioteca Napoletana dei Re d’Aragona (1947-1969) and La legatura artistica in Italia nei secoli XV e XVI (1960) well attest.

San Giorgio Maggiore, seat of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini

The conference featured over twenty bibliographers, librarians, and art historians who have studied De Marinis’s fascinating and multifaceted life and career in depth (for the full conference program see https://www.cini.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/pieghevole-definitivo.pdf), and the conference location was hardly an accident. De Marinis was, in fact, a close friend, and doubtless the favourite advisor of the entrepreneur and great patron of arts Count Vittorio Cini (1885-1977), and he played a pivotal role in the creation and development of the rich library which is a source of pride for the Fondazione. Furthermore, De Marinis chose precisely this prestigious institution as the beneficiary of his impressive ‘biblioteca di studio’, i.e., his personal collection of works on bibliology and bibliography, including archival documents and countless sale catalogues, generally supplemented with annotations in his own hand: a veritable mine of precious information on printing, bookbinding, manuscripts and miniatures, and above all book collecting.

Born in Naples in 1878, De Marinis took his first bookselling steps in his hometown. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he moved to Florence, where he began working with another legendary scholarly bookseller, Leo S. Olschki. He subsequently opened his own bookshop in Florence in 1904, and his first catalogue appeared that same year.

The bookshop in via Vecchietti 3-5, near the Gabinetto Vieusseux (from the catalogue Manuscrits et livres rares mis en vente à la Librairie ancienne T. De Marinis & C., 1908) — The bookshop in via Vecchietti 3-5, near the Gabinetto Vieusseux (from the catalogue *Manuscrits et livres rares mis en vente à la Librairie ancienne T. De Marinis & C.*, 1908)

Numerous catalogues followed, featuring an impressive series of books all of the greatest rarity and many superbly bound, which paid especial homage to the Italian book production and its most celebrated figures.

De Marinis decided to close his Florentine bookshop in 1924, and the stock was sold by Ulrico Hoepli in 1925/26, in three different sales. The related catalogues offer the most vivid testimony of De Marinis’s extraordinary career as an antiquarian book dealer.

After 1924, however, De Marinis did not leave the book world, and his name – as the speakers participating at the aforementioned conference consistently underlined – remained at the centre of a large and international network of booksellers, bibliophiles, connoisseurs, and scholars, many of whom regarded his marvelous Tuscan residences – Villa Montalto in the Florentine Hills, and Villa Celle, near Pistoia – as privileged sites of mutual encounters, intellectual exchange, and, of course, business.

His central, and undisputed position is also testified by his wide correspondence, which is scattered across numerous institutional libraries and archives, as well as in private collections; these documents evidently reveal De Marinis’s recognized and sought-after competence, his experience and knowledge of the market, his exquisite taste in collecting, and his unrivalled flair for business.

Tammaro De Marinis on the Upper East Side

The legacy of Tammaro De Marinis is not exclusively enclosed in libraries or archives, however; rather, it continues to run through the catalogues of booksellers, until today. Over the years many ‘De Marinis copies’ – once offered in the catalogues of the Ancienne Librairie De Marinis, sold by him to pre-eminent collectors, or preserved in his private collection – have also passed through our hands.

We restrict ourselves to a few of the more recent examples, such as a fine manuscript of the works of Virgil, copied in Florence in 1460-1470 by the renowned scribe Nicolaus Riccius (Nicolò di Antonio di Pardo de Ricci), and illuminated in the workshop of the exceptional bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, then the main purveyor of books to aristocrats, popes, cardinals, and scholars across Europe. The handsome blind-tooled binding is characteristically Florentine, and very similar to some of those made by Vespasiano for the Duke of Urbino (for the complete description click here).

In 1914, this volume was chosen by the renowned bookseller Leo Olschki to represent Italian humanistic manuscript production in the Leipzig exhibition Le livre en Italie à travers les siècles.

In the following years, the manuscript came into the possession of De Marinis, and the entry of this “Magnifico codice fiorentino” is included in the first part of the catalogue Vendita all’asta della preziosa collezione proveniente dalla cessata Libreria De Marinis, the sale of his precious stock held at Hoepli in 6-9 May 1925 (lot 211).

The ‘De Marinis’ provenance is also evident in the first volume of the Italian translation of the Vitae by the Greek historian Plutarch, housed in a binding executed by the famous Flemish craftsman Anthon Lodewijk. This volume was only recently reunited with the related second volume after having been separated for a century, and it narrates a fascinating story. In fact, the copy provides a striking example of a perfectly genuine Renaissance binding upon which a forged Apollo and Pegasus round plaquette had been carefully applied (see the complete description of both volumes of this Giolito edition here).

The forged medallion may have been made either in the nineteenth century by the best-known Apollo and Pegasus forger, the Milanese binder Vittorio Villa (d. 1892), who often worked for Guglielmo Libri, or later, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, by Domenico Conti-Borbone, another bookbinder active in Milan who had inherited Villa’s tools after his death.

The plaquette was, in any case, applied before 1911, when the volume appeared in the catalogue Manuscrits Autographes et Livres rares published by the Librarie Ancienne T. De Marinis & C. (lot 319), offered for the sum of 15,000 lire. In the catalogue entry, De Marinis does not identify the Apollo and Pegasus medallion as a forgery, and enthusiastically praises it as a “specimen unique”, and unknown to Giuseppe Fumagalli, who, in 1903, had described two different types of ‘médaillon de Canevari’, both elliptical (see Demetrio Canevari medico e bibliofilio genovese e delle preziose legature che si dicono a lui appartenute, Firenze 1903). The newly discovered plaquette is indeed smaller, round, and with a ground painted in green. Evidently, the careful and in-depth research undertaken in the compilation of his monumental La legatura artistica in Italia was yet to come…

We can also mention the rare edition of the complete Orlando Innamorato issued by the Venetian printer Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio in 1539, once belonging to the great book collector Giacomo Manzoni (1816-1889) and subsequently preserved in the impressive library amassed by Giuseppe Cavalieri (1834-1918), which is especially rich in early Italian illustrated books (see the complete description here). De Marinis was Cavalieri’s favourite bookseller, and was, accordingly, entrusted with the publication of the catalogue of his collection, which appeared in 1908 (see Catalogue des livres composant la Bibliothèque de M. Giuseppe Cavalieri à Ferrara, Florence 1908; the 1539 edition is described at no. 273).

Finally, in the forthcoming issue of the catalogue series Italian Books, we will be presenting new research on two copies which also once belonged to De Marinis, both of exceedingly rarity, a preview of which we include here. First, the only edition of the Florentine Compagnia del Rosario, an illustrated libro di compagnia of the fifteenth century, which includes the text, in Italian vernacular, of the statutes of the Rosary sodality closely associated with the Florentine Dominican cloister of San March (see the complete description here). The edition was issued entirely anonymously and without date, although it is generally attributed to Antonio Miscomini, who was active in Florence between 1481-1485 and 1489-1495.

We have traced that De Marinis offered a copy of this edition in the catalogue Manuscripts, Incunables et Livres Rares of 1913 (see lot 120), wherein he added his enthusiastic appraisal of the copy as a “Bel exemplaire d’un volume rarissime”, and provided information about three other copies of the Florentine Compagnia del Rosario that were then known, these being preserved in the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna, the Biblioteca Comunale Siena, and, finally, in the private collection of Count Melzi, the renowned author of the Bibliografia dei Romanzi e Opere di Cavalleria in Italiano.

To the copies recorded by De Marinis, we can add that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is, however, incomplete, and does not correspond to the description included in the catalogue of 1913. The Melziana copy, bound in red morocco, is actually preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Therefore, our copy is in all likelihood the one offered by De Marinis.

The forthcoming issue of Italian Books will also present the only recorded copy of an undated edition of the Libro de la Ventura by Lorenzo Spirito (see the complete description here), the first fortune-telling game to be printed in 1482, and extensively illustrated as are all books of this kind.

The printing of this edition can be ascribed to the Bolognese Caligula de Bazaleriis, who was active in the city from 1490 to 1504, and who focused his production on popular texts in Italian vernacular.

The first known owner of the copy was Rev. Henry Wellesley, curator of the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum and Taylor Institute (1794-1866); the library was sold in London in 1866, in the rooms of Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge (see Catalogue of the very extensive and valuable library of the late Dr. Wellesley… comprising Italian writers in verse and prose, lot 5573, “A very rare Art of telling of Fortunes by Dice”). The booklet was purchased by the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch, and subsequently offered for the sum of £6.8s in his General Catalogue of Books of 1868, in the section ‘Wood Engraving and Xylography’:

The buyer was the banker Jonathan Peckover of Wisbech, whose engraved ex libris is pasted on the front pastedown.

The copy then passed by descent to his sister Algerina (1841-1927), whose books were sold at Sotheby’s London on 26 May 1925 (lot 495).

The volume was purchased by the booksellers Davis & Orioli, for the sum of 66 pounds, and was later offered again at the rooms of Sotheby’s London, in 1936: in this case the buyer was De Marinis, as he recalled in the essay Le illustrazioni per il Libro de le Sorte di Lorenzo Spirito, included in 1940 in his Appunti e ricerche bibliografiche, and comprising an accurate description of this undated edition:

In the early 1930s, De Marinis had begun studying the woodcut illustrations of Spirito’s fortune-telling book, and the appearance on the market of an unrecorded edition of the Libro de la Ventura had evidently caught his attention. He had previously addressed, on 10 August 1935, a letter, written in French, to one of the greatest collectors of the time, the English businessman Charles William Dyson Perrins (1864-1958), who owned two rare editions of the work, both printed in Milan: a 1501 edition by Guillaume Le Signerre and Gottardo da Ponte, and a 1508 edition by Giovanni Castiglione (see A.W. Pollard, Italian Book Illustration and Early Printing, A Catalogue of the Early Italian Books in the Library of C.W. Dyson Perrins, nos. 157 and 187), asking for photographic reproductions of some leaves.

This letter is tipped-in at the back of our copy, a feature which offers evidence that his correspondent had indeed sent the required images, as revealed by the pencilled notes in English indicating the photo size in inches. Through the comparison with images supplied by numerous institutions and private collectors like ‘Monsieur Perrins’, De Marinis excluded the possibility that this undated Libro de la Ventura could have been printed – as suggested in 1925 – in 1508, attributing the font used for setting the text to the Bolognese printer Caligula de Bazaleriis, and therefore retrodating its publication to the end of the fifteenth century. A cutting taken from the Sotheby’s catalogue of 1925 is bound inside the copy. The collation is emended, in all likelihood in De Marinis’s own hand, and the hypothesis that the edition could be that “described by Brunet as printed at Bologna in 1508” is rejected here with a clear ‘no’:

In our opinion, this copy of Spirito’s Libro de la Ventura, along with the tipped-in letter to Dyson Perrins, are telling documents of the multifaceted figure of Tammaro De Marinis, signaling all at once his passionate collecting of early Italian illustrated editions, his competent knowledge of fifteenth-century printing, his inexhaustible curiosity and capacity for research, the international dimension of his network, and, finally, his firm trust in fruitful collaboration within the likewise multifaceted community of book lovers.

Homage to Tammaro De Marinis

Tammaro De Marinis on the Upper East Side

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