Printer and engraver Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi’s (1627-1691) handsome Prospectus, containing a series of 72 plates depicting the interiors and exteriors of baroque churches of Rome, bound with his fifty-plate Disegni vari altari e cappelle nelle chiese di Roma, on the altars of the city’s churches. The first volume contains an engraved dedication to Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna (1625-1714), and the second, printed by Giovanni Giacomo - with the final few plates giving the name and address of his son Domenico - to Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani (1649-1721), later Pope Clement XI.
De Rossi enjoyed ‘unrivalled success’ as an architectural printer in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, in part thanks to a papal privilege from Pope Alessandro VII that guaranteed the protection of his publications for ten years. The Prospectus ‘gathers together a considerable sample of contemporary architecture in Rome that is systematically depicted…the illustrations are not perspectives, but orthogonal projections, which allow a building to be objectively represented in two dimensions. […] The importance [of De’ Rossi’s books] as a portable gallery of beautiful buildings for the visitor to Rome, and, more significantly, as a tool for late seventeenth and eighteenth century architects, has long been acknowledged and can scarcely be overestimated’ (Aceto, ‘From building to print’, pp.697-8). Thirty plates at the centre of the first work were printed in 1650 by Francois Collignon, reissues of prints by Valerien Regnart and known under the title Praecipua urbis romanae templa (Aceto, pp.700-1); further plates are after designs by Francesco Antonio Bufalini, Lorenzo Nuvolone and engraved by Giovanni Francesco Venturini, Nicolas Belin and Giovanni Falda and others, with several unsigned. They depict, among others, the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, the Chiesa dei Santi Luca e Martina, the Chiesa Sant’Agnese in Agone and, first and foremost, St Peter’s basilica in the Vatican, complete with interior, exterior and floorplan. Venturini is also responsible for several of the engravings in the Disegni, though many are unsigned. The title is after Ciro Ferri, by de Pitri.
The original drawings for the plates for both the Prospectus and the Disegni survive in the collections of both the Uffizi and the Ashmolean, and are extremely revealing of the practical processes used to transfer images from drawings directly on to the plate to be engraved (see compelling recent research by Angelamaria Aceto, ‘From Building to Print’).
Provenance: Twentieth-century typographic bookplate of A.C. Lascarides to front pastedown, collector of classical and Philhellenic works. 2. From the library of Derek Gibson (1936-2021).
Berlin Kat., 2672, 2673.
