Tonci, Salvatore
Descrizione ragionata della Galleria Doria preduta da un breve saggio di pittura dedicata a sua altezza la Principezza Radzivill castellana di Vilna.
Roma, Liuigi Perego Salvioni 1794
Full Description
8vo. xviii + 235 + (1)pp, engraved folding plate. Contemporary marbled wrappers, neatly rebacked, upper cover of wrappers also repaired for loss of surface at left hand side and at lower outer corner. Title leaf repaired at lower outer corner without loss to printed surface. A little spotting at margins, but essentially a good, fresh copy. From the stock of the late Diana Parikian, antiquarian bookseller.
The first printed description, and a very full one, of the collection of paintings in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome, primarily put together in the middle of the seventeenth century by Camillo Pamphili, nephew of Pope Innocent X, but enlarged by subsequent generations of the Pamphili and Doria Pamphili familes. The collection is still extant today and includes the celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velasquez (described here on p.162). Salvatore Tonci (1756-1844), who both wrote the description of the paintings and an introductory essay on painting as a fine art, was living and working in Rome at that time, but his complicated career had previously taken him to Naples and to Bologna, and after a brief spell in Poland, where he had been employed as a professional singer at the court of King Stanislaus Poniatowski, he went to Russia, establishing himself as a portrait painter and drawing teacher in Moscow and marrying into the Russian aristocracy. His contacts with Poland doubtless account for the fact that his book is dedicated to Princess Radziwill, a member of the wealthiest of all Polish aristocratic families at that time. Cicognara 3892.