Item #4062 Officio della B. V. Maria per tutti i tempi dell' anno, Con le dichiarazioni, e spiegazioni dell' Abate Alessandro Mazzinelli. Latin and Italian OFFICE OF THE VIRGIN.
Officio della B. V. Maria per tutti i tempi dell' anno, Con le dichiarazioni, e spiegazioni dell' Abate Alessandro Mazzinelli.
Officio della B. V. Maria per tutti i tempi dell' anno, Con le dichiarazioni, e spiegazioni dell' Abate Alessandro Mazzinelli.
From the wrong side of town?

Officio della B. V. Maria per tutti i tempi dell' anno, Con le dichiarazioni, e spiegazioni dell' Abate Alessandro Mazzinelli. Rome: Gioacchino & Giovanni Giuseppe Salvioni, Stampatori Pontificii Vaticani, 1756.

8vo (210 x 135 mm). [24], 407, [1] pp. 2 parts, the Office of the Dead separately titled. Printed in red and black. Engraved frontispiece and 12 full-page engravings by Arnold Van Weserhout and Jacob Frey after Joseph Passarus (Giuseppe Passaro), two engraved title vignettes and 12 tailpiece vignettes, a few unsigned, others by Frey after Passaro or by M. Schedi (engraver), 3 engraved initials, numerous red-printed woodcut initials. Occasional light browning. 18th-century Roman(?) gold-tooled red goatskin, covers with densely tooled dentelle border built up from leafy plant tools, sprigs, floral and arabesque tools, each cornerpiece enclosing a grid with gold dots, blossom tools and dots in central field, ornamental centerpiece of large foliate, arabesque and dandelion tools, spine in six uniformly gold-tooled compartments, block-printed pastedown endpapers with flower and fruit design stencil-colored in red, green and yellow, gilt edges with gauffred border design; upper cover a bit faded and bowed, corner bumped, a couple of scrapes to lower cover. Provenance: Horace de Landau (1824-1904), bookplate, shelfmark no 47854; Vicomte de Cossette, armorial bookplate.***

A rococo binding on a luxuriously printed and illustrated Office of the Virgin, from the Salvioni press, official printers to the Vatican.

The Salvioni press used several workshops, sometimes collectively mislabeled as the “Vatican” or “Salvioni” bindery. Those bound for the papal library were finely executed, and different binderies can be identified by their tools, color of leather, and stylistic details. The present pretty but crowded binding decor, with its in places overlapping tooling, does not seem to belong to the corpus of binderies represented in, for example, the Vatican Library’s 1977 exhibit catalogue of papal bindings. Stylistically it uses types of tools and decoration — the wide “Louis XV” style border, and the basketweave cornerpieces — in vogue during the reigns of Clement XIV (1769-1774) and Pius VI (1775-1799). Its decoration is similar, for example, to binding no. 262 in Legature papali, but it is of inferior workmanship, and does not use the same tools. It was probably produced in a Roman shop executing many commissions and forced to work quickly, although it could even be a provincial binding. Cf. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Legature papali da Eugenio IV a Paolo VI, no. 262, plate CXCI.
Item #4062

Price: $2,000.00