Ornamenti o grottesche. by Della Bella, Stefano.

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~ Ornamenti o grottesche. [?Paris, early nineteenth-century].

12 etched plates (including 2 title plates), tall 8vo (240 × 84 mm), contemporary manuscript mongrams to head of each. Browned, title plate with staining and fragility at foot with slight loss to blank margin. Stitched at narrow edge in early or contemporary blue paper wrapper. Old repair to upper wrap with additional blue paper and caption in French manuscript. Fragile, but sound..

A nineteenth-century reimpression of one of the several celebrated collections of etched grotesques by baroque painter and engraver Stefano della Bella (1610-1664). Working variously in his native Florence, Rome and Paris he developed a daring and fanciful ornamental style, instrumental in the development of the French baroque style. His patrons included Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin and he had supplied the famous etched title-page for Galileo’s Dialogo of 1632. These are clearly much later impressions, printed on wove paper and in blue wrappers suggesting a date around or shortly after 1800. Each plate bears a small contemporary manuscript monogram across the plate border, presumably as a publisher’s guarantee of authenticity. OCLC: Getty, Harvard, Texas.

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