Flora overo cultura di fiori Del P. Gio: Battista Ferrari Sanese della Comp. di Giesù Distinta in Quattro Libri E trasportata dalla lingua Latina nell’ Italiana da Lodovico Aureli Perugino
THE FAIRHAVEN COPY
Rome: Pietro Antonio Facciotti, 1638. First edition in Italian, second issue.
Quarto (9 ¾” x 7 3/8”, 248mm x 187mm): ✠4(±✠1) ✠✠4 A-Xxx4 Yyy6(–Yyy6) [$2 signed; –✠1, N2, Ooo2; +Yy3]. 281 leaves, pp. [16] (engraved title, blank, 2pp. dedication to Anna Colonna Barberini, 4pp. to the reader, imprimatur, note on the plates, 4pp. contents, frontispiece, blank) 1-520 [26] (26pp. index). With an engraved title-page, engraved frontispiece and 45 engraved plates after Pietro da Cortona, Guido Reni et al., all integral with the text.
Bound in XVIIIc half mottled calf over tree-marbled paper boards (re-backed with the original back-strip laid down). On the spine, five panels. Author and title gilt to citron calf in the second panel. All edges of the text-block speckled red. Fore and lower edges of the text-block untrimmed.
Re-backed with the original back-strip laid down. Some rubbing to the extremities. Persistent but mostly very pale damp-stain to the upper edge of the text-block. Moderate tanning to quires Ss and Zz; a little peripheral tanning throughout, particularly at the deckle-edges. Stains to Mm1 and Fff3. The bottom edge of the title-leaf trimmed and replaced, and some old repairs to ✠3-4. Dd1-2 partly unopened. Armorial bookplate of Henry Rogers Broughton to the front paste-down.
Giovanni Battista Ferrari (1584–1655) was a Sienese Jesuit who, in addition to deep learning in Semitic languages (he was professor of Hebrew at the Jesuit College in Rome) managed the gardens of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome (now home to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica). There the famed gardens were joined by a library of botanical manuscripts, placing Ferrari at the heart of the horticultural revolution, with the land and resources of an important papal family (the dedicatee was Anna Colonna Barberini, niece of Pope Urban VIII). The twin stars of Ferrari’s botanical output are the present work — first published in Latin in 1633, but suppressed because of the references to the Accademia dei Lincei and their microscope — and the Hesperides, the first European book on citrus.
The Flora, here translated by Ludovico Aureli from Latin into “Tuscan,” is one of the first floral works that prioritizes the aesthetic over the medicinal. The plates (for which the work is most celebrated), engraved after the great baroque Italian artists of the day (Cortona, Reni, Andrea Sacchi), all also in the employ of the Barberini, depict garden design, allegories of the gardener (including one particularly heroic slaying of a slug), tools, bouquets and individual species, labeled in ribbon banderoles. The present second issue lacks the errata (Yy6), the errors having been corrected.
Henry Rogers Broughton (1900–1973), second baron, was the brother of the first Baron Fairhaven (Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton), a title created for their father, Urban Hanlon Broughton, who died before it could be bestowed upon him. Their mother was the heiress of Henry H. Rogers, the stupendously wealthy oil magnate who became a senior executive of Standard Oil. Armed with their grandfather’s American fortune, the Broughtons were able to buy and to maintain Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. The second Baron Fairhaven amassed one of the great collections of natural history books and art (partly donated to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge). The present volume was bought from the second part of his epochal sale at Sotheby’s London (29 November 2022, lot 76).
Nissen, BBI 620; Oak Spring Flora 29; Pritzel 2877; USTC 4013966.
Item #JLR0380
Price: $8,500