Venetian splendour

This is a copy of the first edition of Il parnaso veneziano (1796): a poem in praise of Venice and its poets by the Jesuit polymath Saverio Bettinelli (1718–1808), with a long essay ‘Della cultura della poesia presso li veneziani’ by Jacopo Morelli (1745–1819), the great librarian of St Mark’s. It is also a nice example of an important contribution ‘by eighteenth-century Venice to the modern illustrated book: the practice of preparing a distinctive binding for individual editions.  With only a bare possibility of a short-lived precedent in late fifteenth-century Augsburg, the practice, now universally accepted for professionally published books and generally regarded a result of nineteenth century industrialisation, began, I believe, with a certain number of rococo Venetian presentation books.  These individual edition bindings were characteristically decorative.  Large sheets of paper—usually washed or color printed—were overprinted in color with designs appropriately sized for the planned pages.  Then the sheets were wrapped over and pasted down to the gathered signatures.  The Venetian designs had distinct sections for the front cover, the spine, and the back cover.  The cover designs always had borders framing reserved central areas.  An ornamental shield with the general monogram VV (“Viva Venezia”), a figurative vignette appropriate to the family, or an ornamental shield with the specific arms or monogram of the celebrant to whom the book was dedicated is often found on the lower cover.  The front cover, however, always had an ornamental shield containing the specific arms of the celebrated nobleman for an ingresso, or in the case of a wedding, the arms of one or both of the celebrating spouses.  The individual covers were prepared for particular occasions and the accompanying volume …  When these covers exist in good condition their color is intense—rose, blue-violet, green, yellow, gold.  They are beautifully decorative and completely harmonious with the charm and ornamentation of their contents.  These fragile paper covers are rare, however, and thus the history of their use remains tentative’ (A. Robison, ‘Componimenti poetici per l’ingresso solenne alla dignità di procuratore… Lodovico Manin (Venice, Albrizzi, 1764)’, Vision of a Collector. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection in the Library of Congress, Washington, 1991, p. 355).

For more details on this, and other 18th-century books in their original printed wrappers, please see my latest e-list.