Földvári Books

Sixteenth-Century Rome without Illusion—Dosio and Cavalieri’s Complete Monumental Survey (1569)

Dosio, Giovanni Antonio; Cavalieri, Giovanni Battista

[Urbis Romae] Cosmo Medici Duci Florentinorum et Senensium Urbis Romae Aedificiorum illustrium quae supersunt reliquiae, summa cum diligentia, a Ioanne Antonio Dosio, stilo ferreo, ut hodie cernuntur, descriptae, et a Io. Baptista de Cavaleriis aeneis tabulis incisis repraesentatae.

[Rome or Florence]: M.D.LXIX. Kal. Mai [1569]. Engraved title and 49 numbered full-page plates (numbered 2–50), complete. First edition. Latin text engraved beneath each image. Later quarter calf over marbled boards; spine with red morocco label titled Urbis Romae. Marbled endpapers. 50 plates (title included). (c. 270 × 190 mm). Light browning; title-page with small tear at lower edge; occasional spotting and marginal dampmarks. Plates 46 and 47 misbound out of sequence. Plates otherwise clean and well-preserved.

Rare complete copy of Dosio’s celebrated 1569 architectural suite of ancient Rome, etched by Cavalieri and praised by Fowler for its sober fidelity and avoidance of archaeological fantasy.

First edition of this important early corpus of Roman architectural views, drawn by Giovanni Antonio Dosio and engraved by Giovanni Battista Cavalieri. The sequence depicts surviving ancient monuments in the city of Rome as they appeared in the mid-sixteenth century, rendered without imaginative reconstruction. The etched views include the Colosseum, Arch of Titus, Palatine Hill, Temple of Vesta, Pantheon, Tiber Island, and other landmarks, often shown amid vegetation or with figures for scale.

Dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici, the title-page is framed by a triumphal arch flanked by Egyptian caryatids and the Medici palle. The work was reissued in 1640 by De Rossi, but the present edition retains the original engraved title and sequence.

The series is archaeologically significant for its fidelity to the visual state of Rome’s ruins before modern excavations. Of over 110 original drawings by Dosio for this project, only 28 survive today (14 in Berlin, 14 in the Uffizi).

Complete with all 50 plates.

References: Fowler, Architecture, 117 (“One of the most important of the sixteenth-century collections of views of Rome, being free from the fantastic reconstructions so dear to the archaeologists of the period”); Lukomski, Architettura Classica, pp. 412–415.

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Price: €12,000.00