Catalogue Announcement: Italian Books III
Watch this space!
We are excited to announce that the third installment of our Italian Books series is in the works! The series, which was inaugurated in the spring of 2019, brings together important material either produced in Italy or by Italians and printed abroad, and in that vein features an array of manuscripts, documents, printed books, engravings, drawings, and artist’s books, all contributing to the story of Italy’s place on the world stage.
Italian Books III will continue this tradition with a special emphasis on books about architecture. Some highlights of this section include Francesco Borromini's Opera and Opus Architectonicum, the results of a large publication project planned by the Baroque architect but left unfinished upon his death in 1667 and finally realized by Sebastiano Giannini in Rome in 1720 and 1725, respectively, as well the exquisite Nuova Pianta di Roma by architect and surveyor Giovanni Battista Nolli, published in 1748. Composed of twelve double-page plates, this is the finest eighteenth-century plan of Rome, a landmark ichnographic map and the first plan of the city to use the north-south geographical convention.
We are also pleased to include a variety of other treasures from beyond the world of architecture, such as a copy of Bernardino Corio's important Dello eccellentissimo oratore messer Bernardino Corio milanese, the first history of Milan to be written in the vernacular, which was published by Giovanni Giacomo Da Legnano and Alessandro Minuziano in 1503 and is presented here in a binding bearing the coat of arms of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, chief minister of Louis XIV. Another significant “first” is in the form of Lazzaro Soardi's edition of Cicero's M. T. Ciceronis Tres de officiis libri, et aureum illud de amicitia senectuteque volumen una cum paradoxis hoc habentur pugillari, printed in Venice in 1511, the first edition of Cicero — and among the earliest books ever — to be published in the new duodecimo format.
Gems from the world of science will also be represented, including a first edition of Marco Aurelio Severino's De recondita abscessuum natura, published in Naples in 1632 by Ottavio Beltrano, a medical book of the greatest importance owing to its status as the first textbook of surgical pathology and its early depictions of pathological lesions, as well as the author's close epistolary relationship with William Harvey. We can also mention here a copy of Michel Jean de Borch’s famous Lettres sur les truffes du Piemont, printed by the Reycends brothers in Milan in 1780, a key work of early mycology in which the Polish aristocrat and naturalist makes the first official classification of the white truffle.
These are just a few of the items we look forward to presenting in Italian Books III. Stay tuned for more details! In the meantime, we invite you to peruse Italian Books I and II, the latter being a special edition devoted entirely to works on blue paper.