Antiquarian Books including a series of views of Milan
Sale #MIOL37
The core of this sale is an extensive collection of incunabula, mostly from Italian workshops and some with fine illumination and contemporary bindings, including the 1470 de Spira Livy, an unrecorded Italian Confessionale, and Poggio and Bruni’s Florentine histories bound in one volume. There are numerous Aldine imprints, in both Latin and Greek, including a rare copy of Scipione Forteguerri’s lecture on the superiority of Greek over Latin. Greek printing is also represented in works produced by Alopa, Estienne and Bodoni, as well as a first edition of Lascaris’s Greek-Latin dictionary from 1478.
The sale also includes one of the earliest printed books from Romania, a copy of the Gospels in Church Slavonic commissioned by the Prince of Wallachia from the monk Macarius, printed in Tîrgovişte in 1512, in a contemporary tooled binding.
There are numerous illustrated works from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the elegant letters of St Jerome printed in Ferrara in 1484 to humbler popular works such as the Sienese pamphlet printed for the 1546 Palio. The pilgrimage of Niccolò da Poggibonsi to the Holy Land features in two early editions, the first edition of 1500 and the smaller but rarer 1529 edition, both with topographical illustrations. There are also numerous illustrated devotional texts, from a Parisian printed book of hours to Scalvo’s 1569 Rosariae Preces decorated in a similar style.
Scientific works include a second edition of Pacioli’s arithmetical compendium, Guido Bonati’s astronomical treatise in a fine contemporary binding, and Regiomontanus’s epitome of Ptolemy, accompanied by numerous military works on fortifications. Natural history works include Mattioli’s herbal and Bock’s Kreuterbuch, and travel is represented by La Pérouse, Zárate and Nicolas de Nicolay.
Later works include a first edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s magisterial Encyclopédie, a beautiful set of Blaeu’s townbooks of Italy, Doppelmayr’s celestial atlas and the first edition of Pinocchio.
Bidding Opens:
Sep 27th 10:30am
Closes: Oct 4th (concludes with a fine series of prints depicting the monuments & topography of Milan).
EXHIBITION:
Sep 27th - Oct 3rd 11am - 1pm, 2pm - 6pm
Palazzo Serbelloni
Corso Venezia, 16
Milan, Italy
45.468854766142, 9.1999536
Sotheby's - Milan
