Main Content
Summary
Author: (Orlandi, Pellegrino Antonio)
Title: L'abcedario pittorico dall' autore ristampato corretto et accresciuto di molti professori e di altre notizie spettanti alla pittura.
Publication: Bologna, Costantino Pisarri 1719.
Price: £740
Reference: 06815
Full Description
4to. 519 + (1)pp. (including five woodcut text ills of artists' monograms). Contemporary full calf. Late 18th century engraved armorial bookplate of a member of the Trotter family, of Mortonhall, co. Midlothian (see above). Book label of Peter and Linda Murray. Title leaf a little spotted, and slight worm damage affecting blank outer margin of last four leaves, but a good, unrestored copy.
Second, improved edition of this biographical dictionary of painters by Fra P.A. Orlandi, a Carmelite friar from Bologna. It is updated throughout from the first edition of 1704, and includes a new dedication by Orlandi to the art collector Pierre Crozat. As a biographical dictionary it remains useful for its coverage of Italian painters, and eighteenth-century readers would also have found helpful Orlandi's extensive accompanying bibliography and a section at the end in which he gives instructions on the mixing of artists' colours and explains painting techniques. The present copy is shown by a bookplate to have belonged to a member of the Trotter family, of Mortonhall, Midlothian, and it may be relevant in this context that Andrew Hay (d.1754), the Scottish picture dealer who purchased a collection of 2420 engraved portraits from Fra Orlandi in 1720, seems to have been related to a Mrs Trotter (Ingamells, p.475). BAL Cat 2336 (this edition) ; Cicognara 2169 (1704 edition).