Baldinucci, Filippo
Cominciamento e progresso dell’arte dell’intagliatore in rame colle vite di molti de’ più eccellenti maestri della stessa professione … con annotazioni del Sig. Domenico Maria Manni ; Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte di disegno ; Notizie de’ professori di disegno da Cimabue … con note ed aggiunte.
Milano, Società Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani 1808 ; 1809 ; 1811-2.
Full Description
8vo. 3 items, uniformly bound as a set of 14 vols. (Cominciamento) (1 vol.) : engraved frontispiece, xii + 287 + (1)pp ; (Vocabolario) (2 vols) : 370 + (2)pp ; 359 + (1)pp ; (Notizie) (11 vols) : xxxiii + (1) + 583 + (1)pp ; 547 + (1)pp ; 416 (ex 418 ?, apparently lacking last leaf of index) + (2)pp ; 663 + (1)pp ; 590 + (2)pp ; 583 + (1)pp ; 487 + (1)pp ; 512 + (2)pp ; 499 + (1)pp ; 531 + (1)pp ; 312 + (2)pp. The pagination of each volume allows for a half title leaf, not present in any volume of this set, where it is represented in each case by a blank preliminary leaf provided by the volume’s early nineteenth century binder. Contemporary quarter calf, marbled boards (bindings of a few of the volumes slightly cracking at joints, but a good , clean set). Bookplates of 1st Baron Dinorben (1767-1852), plutocrat and Whig politician (his family’s wealth derived from their share in the Parys copper mine in North Wales). Also recent book labels of Peter and Linda Murray.
The art historians Peter and Linda Murray’s set of this good early nineteenth-century collected edition of the works of the Florentine scholar Filippo Baldinucci (1624-1696), including his “Notizie” (in eleven volumes) on the lives of Italian and other painters, sculptors, architects and engravers active between the thirteenth century and the third quarter of the seventeenth century. They had initially been published in the 1680s, with posthumous supplementary volumes following in 1700 and 1728, but had first appeared in collected form in an edition by the scholar D.M. Manni, published in Florence between 1767 and 1774, on which the present edition is based. Baldinucci, who was the first biographer of Bernini, saw himself as the successor of Vasari as historian of the lives of artists, and his volumes, which embody a great mass of documentary and anecdotal information about the principal artists of his time, are an indispensable element in the literature of Italian art history. The present edition also includes Baldinucci’s Italian-language dictionary of the technical terms used by artists. Cicognara 2001, 2000, 2146 (all earlier editions).