First quarto edition of Bartoli’s Italian translation of the Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti’s ten-book treatise on building and architecture from the famous Pinelli library and latterly in Lord Clark’s collection.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the first theorist of humanist art, was a scholar, painter, sculptor and architect. His De re aedificatoria was his masterpiece and told architects how buildings should be built rather than how they were built. It remained the classic treatise on architecture from its first publication in 1485 until the end of the 18th century.
“The title is within a reduced copy of the architectural woodcut border of the title page of the 1550 folio edition. The illustrations are also reduced and reversed copies of the same edition… In the new dedication to Duke Cosimo de Medici, Bartoli points out that fifteen years have passed since his translation of Alberti’s L’ Architettura was printed by Lorenzo Torrentino and that now, it being difficult to find, he has been urged to reprint it, which he is doing in smaller and more convenient form” (Fowler).
The additional two leaves in quire ‘S’ (pp. 284/5) hold the designs of the upper parts of towers which were intended to be cut out and pasted above the lower parts already illustrated. The double-page plan of the Baths of Diocletian is inserted in this copy between pp. 324 and 325.
Provenance: ink inscription on fly-leaf “1790. Bought at the Pinelli sale, 4 shillings”, from the library of of the Venetian printer and collector Maffeo Pinelli (1735-85). Pinelli’s library was first catalogued for sale at fixed prices by Jacopo Morelli, librarian at the Marciana, at Venice in 1787. It was subsequently bought en bloc by the London bookseller James Edwards for £6000, and put up for auction in London, sold as Bibliotheca Pinelliana 1789-90, in a sale of 12,899 lots over 60 days, the present work being lot 1373. Edwards was one of the earliest English dealers representing the “new and more enlightened generation of booksellers, operating on a large scale and reaping handsome profits” (S. De Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts 1930, p. 89). This legendary sale, his first great success, was the first auction of its kind to be held in London, and contributed greatly to the diffusion of Italian books to English collectors.
Booklabel of the bibliophile and musician Louis Thompson Rowe (1855-1927).
Bookplate of the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903-83) who wrote several articles on Alberti and in 1977 stated that he had spent ‘several years collecting materials for a book on Alberti which, owing to the war, was never written’.
Censimento Edit 16 725. Fowler 9. Cicognara 376. Gamba 1186.
