Vita del Gran Michelangnolo (Michelangelo) Buonarroti. Scrita da M. Giorgio Vasari, Pittore & Architetto Aretino. Con le sue Magnifiche Essequie stategli fatte in Fiorenza. Dall' Achademia del DIsegno
Michelangelo Buonarroti. Vasari, Giorgio
Florence. Nella Stamperia de' Giunti. 1568
An excellent, large margined and annotated copy of the rare first offprint from any work, the discrete edition of the first artistic biography of Michelangelo by Giorgio Vasari.
The second edition of Giorgio Vasari's famous biographical compendium, the 1568 illustrated edition of'Le Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori ... &c.' included an updated biography of Michelangelo from 1550 (the date of the first, unillustrated, edition) until 1564 (the date of Michelangelo's death). So popular did Vasari imagine this particular biography would prove, shortly after the dedication of the whole edition to Cosimo de' Medici in January 1568, he wrote a new dedication to Alessandro de' Medici (later, very briefly, the shortest-serving pontiff, Pope Leo XI) in February 1568 and issued the present work. The sheets of the printed text for the biography in the 'Vite' were used here (the pagination and signatures remain the same) together with three new and additional leaves: a new title (it uses only the most central of the blocks from the 'Vite' titles with the arms of the Medici at the head and the vignette view of Florence beneath) with the new dedication mentioned above and a final inserted leaf with 'Registro' recto and the colophon and large woodcut device of the Giunti verso. Whether the idea for this edition was Vasari's - he claims credit in the dedication (see below) and as PMM indicates 'Michelangelo was his great hero' - or that of the Giuntas, the precedent for the offprint was established and a clever piece of cost-reducing marketing implemented. The fact that two issues of the work are known suggests too that the device was successful.
This copy is from the first issue with Vasari's dedication to Alessandro de' Medici dated February 6th 1567; as Breslauer states so succinctly: 'As it is unthinkable that the dedication for the offprint should have been written eleven months before the dedication for the entire work [i.e. the whole of the 'Vite'], to Cosimo de' Medici, which is dated January 1568, the date 1567 is obviously a printer's error which was corrected in later copies'. It should be added that the date of the dedication in the present separatum is also an interesting indication of how soon Vasari's or the Giuntas intention (or decision) to publish the discrete biography occurred after the dedication of the whole edition, a period of only a few weeks, and is a further measure of how important this offfprint was considered to be. A final irony is that the note in OCLC regarding the dating of the dedication of this first issue is also in error and gives the year as '1857' ('In this state, the dedication has old-style date Feb. 6, 1857') and misspells Buonarroti giving it three instances of the letter 'R'; that the error is repeated across multiple entries is suggestive of the practices of modern bibliographers rather than Florentine typesetters in the Cinquecento.
The annotations in the present copy, all in sepia ink, mainly consist of highlighting and underlining, but there are also marginal notes (dates, names and places) and other indications, some faded but all untrimmed, of a clear engagement with Vasari's text.
'C'est un tirage à part de la grande édition des Vite ... mais il a un titre particulier et une dédicace spéciale ... Le dernier f., qui porte le colophon, est également spéciale à cette pièce extrêmement rare.' (Brunet).
'An offprint from the 1568 Vite, with a title-page and dedication leaf added at front and a new half sheet EEeee at the end ... The new signature EEeee2 contains a new setting of the last two text pages from the Vite, with a type-ornament tailpiece added to EEeeee1v, a register on EEeee2r, and Giunta device and colophon on EEeee2v. Otherwise, the setting is that of the Vite with page numbers and signature marks unchanged.' (Ruth Mortimer).
We trace copies at the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Universiteit Leiden; we trace a number of further copies all with the errors cited above (i.e. with the dedication dated '1857' and 'Buonarrroti' in the title) as follows: New York University, the Getty Research Institute, Yale, Harvard (two copies), Wake Forest (North Carolina), Brigham Young (Utah) and the National Art Library at the V & A. Three further copies, all suspiciously give the same provenance, are held at the Courtauld, Oxford and the British Library. Needless to say these errors in bibliography rather undermine confidence in what may otherwise be accurate records.
[Brunet Suppl. II, 846; Mortimer Italian 517; not in Cicognara; see Bernard Breslauer's response to A. N. L. Munby's original query ('Query 85. The Origin of Offprints': ' ... Can any reader cite examples of offprints before 1772?') in 'Bibliographical Notes and Queries' in 'The Book Collector', Vol. 6, Nos. 3 (Autumn) & 4 (Winter), 1957; see PMM 88 for the 1568 'Vite'].
The second edition of Giorgio Vasari's famous biographical compendium, the 1568 illustrated edition of'Le Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori et Architettori ... &c.' included an updated biography of Michelangelo from 1550 (the date of the first, unillustrated, edition) until 1564 (the date of Michelangelo's death). So popular did Vasari imagine this particular biography would prove, shortly after the dedication of the whole edition to Cosimo de' Medici in January 1568, he wrote a new dedication to Alessandro de' Medici (later, very briefly, the shortest-serving pontiff, Pope Leo XI) in February 1568 and issued the present work. The sheets of the printed text for the biography in the 'Vite' were used here (the pagination and signatures remain the same) together with three new and additional leaves: a new title (it uses only the most central of the blocks from the 'Vite' titles with the arms of the Medici at the head and the vignette view of Florence beneath) with the new dedication mentioned above and a final inserted leaf with 'Registro' recto and the colophon and large woodcut device of the Giunti verso. Whether the idea for this edition was Vasari's - he claims credit in the dedication (see below) and as PMM indicates 'Michelangelo was his great hero' - or that of the Giuntas, the precedent for the offprint was established and a clever piece of cost-reducing marketing implemented. The fact that two issues of the work are known suggests too that the device was successful.
This copy is from the first issue with Vasari's dedication to Alessandro de' Medici dated February 6th 1567; as Breslauer states so succinctly: 'As it is unthinkable that the dedication for the offprint should have been written eleven months before the dedication for the entire work [i.e. the whole of the 'Vite'], to Cosimo de' Medici, which is dated January 1568, the date 1567 is obviously a printer's error which was corrected in later copies'. It should be added that the date of the dedication in the present separatum is also an interesting indication of how soon Vasari's or the Giuntas intention (or decision) to publish the discrete biography occurred after the dedication of the whole edition, a period of only a few weeks, and is a further measure of how important this offfprint was considered to be. A final irony is that the note in OCLC regarding the dating of the dedication of this first issue is also in error and gives the year as '1857' ('In this state, the dedication has old-style date Feb. 6, 1857') and misspells Buonarroti giving it three instances of the letter 'R'; that the error is repeated across multiple entries is suggestive of the practices of modern bibliographers rather than Florentine typesetters in the Cinquecento.
The annotations in the present copy, all in sepia ink, mainly consist of highlighting and underlining, but there are also marginal notes (dates, names and places) and other indications, some faded but all untrimmed, of a clear engagement with Vasari's text.
'C'est un tirage à part de la grande édition des Vite ... mais il a un titre particulier et une dédicace spéciale ... Le dernier f., qui porte le colophon, est également spéciale à cette pièce extrêmement rare.' (Brunet).
'An offprint from the 1568 Vite, with a title-page and dedication leaf added at front and a new half sheet EEeee at the end ... The new signature EEeee2 contains a new setting of the last two text pages from the Vite, with a type-ornament tailpiece added to EEeeee1v, a register on EEeee2r, and Giunta device and colophon on EEeee2v. Otherwise, the setting is that of the Vite with page numbers and signature marks unchanged.' (Ruth Mortimer).
We trace copies at the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Universiteit Leiden; we trace a number of further copies all with the errors cited above (i.e. with the dedication dated '1857' and 'Buonarrroti' in the title) as follows: New York University, the Getty Research Institute, Yale, Harvard (two copies), Wake Forest (North Carolina), Brigham Young (Utah) and the National Art Library at the V & A. Three further copies, all suspiciously give the same provenance, are held at the Courtauld, Oxford and the British Library. Needless to say these errors in bibliography rather undermine confidence in what may otherwise be accurate records.
[Brunet Suppl. II, 846; Mortimer Italian 517; not in Cicognara; see Bernard Breslauer's response to A. N. L. Munby's original query ('Query 85. The Origin of Offprints': ' ... Can any reader cite examples of offprints before 1772?') in 'Bibliographical Notes and Queries' in 'The Book Collector', Vol. 6, Nos. 3 (Autumn) & 4 (Winter), 1957; see PMM 88 for the 1568 'Vite'].
[44 leaves; pp. (i), (ii), 717 - 796, (ii)]. Collation: (*2), Ssss4 - Tttt4, Vvvv4, Xxxx4 - Zzzz4, AAaaa4 - EEeee1 + final unsigned inserted leaf. Small 4to. (240 x 166 mm). Leaf with printed pictorial title with elaborate decorative woodcut border (the central block reused from vols. II and III of the 1568 'Vite' title, i.e. with the woodcut view of Florence) surmounted by the Medici arms, leaf with decorative woodcut head-piece and seven-line inhabited initial with Vasari's dedication to Alessandro de Medici recto and verso dated 1567 (see below), leaf with half-page woodcut portrait of Michelangelo within decorative architectural border with five-line woodcut initial and Vasari's text in Tuscan in Roman type, 46 lines with headline and catchword, conclusion of text in italic with small decorative typographic woodcut tail-piece, final leaf with 'Registro' and decorative typographic woodcut recto and colophon with large woodcut Giunta device verso, numerous mispaginations and errors in signature as usual (but complete), marginal manuscript annotations and underlining in sepia ink throughout; sheet size: 235 x 155 mm. Later full limp vellum with Yapp edges.
#48781
