Le Loggie di Raffaello al Vaticano.
[Rome]. [1867]. First edition. Comprising 52 albumen prints after Raphael’s Logge. Prints of varying size: most ca. 40 × 32 cm; eight large-format plates ca. 55–58 × 42 cm, covering nearly the full leaf; and six smaller ca. 35 × 28 cm. Mounted on card leaves. Captions consist of printed slips mounted beneath each image, giving titles in French and Italian, accompanied by a Latin biblical quotation, each plate numbered. Some plates bear the blindstamp “Établissement Photographique, P. Dovizielli, Rome, Rue Babuino 135” at the lower right corner. Large folio (ca. 62 × 48 cm). Contemporary imitation vellum over boards, gilt double fillet border and corner ornaments, upper cover gilt-lettered “Le Loggie di Raffaello al Vaticano”. Three brass clasps and catches (only one intact). Spine gilt-tooled. All edges gilt. Original white moiré paper endpapers. 52 plates. Condition: spine’s upper compartment detached but preserved and laid inside; two lower compartments missing. Joints splitting; covers chipped at edges, panels stained and discolored. Plates in mixed state: many well-preserved with strong tonal range, others somewhat to considerably faded. A few card leaves show insect grazing, not affecting the images. Overall a complete and stable set, in good condition for a work of this scale and fragility.
Extremely scarce complete set of 52 plates — the first photographic reproductions of Raphael’s Logge in the Vatican — by the Italian pioneer photographer Pietro Dovizielli.
This monumental album represents the first photographic reproductions of Raphael’s Vatican Logge, executed by Pietro Dovizielli with official authorization granted on 15 November 1866. The Logge, decorated between 1517 and 1519 under Leo X, are among Raphael’s greatest achievements in Rome, a continuous fresco cycle of biblical scenes and ornamental grotesques conceived as a modern counterpart to the Vatican Stanze. Issued in 1867 as a complete series of 52 large-format plates — the “quaderni fotografici” — the project was conceived as a methodical, progressive collection intended to make photography an “auxiliary of art” through systematic documentation. The unusually grand scale of the prints (most ca. 40 × 32 cm, with some sheets extending to nearly 60 × 42 cm) gave viewers an unprecedented opportunity to study the details of Raphael’s frescoes outside the Vatican, a feat almost impossible to achieve from engravings or on-site inspection alone. As one of Raphael’s most celebrated Vatican cycles, the Logge were already central to his legacy, and the combination of their subject matter with Dovizielli’s strikingly large and precise photographs made the achievement immediately evident to contemporaries. The set was presented at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, where it earned a bronze medal, and was immediately recognized as the definitive photographic record of Raphael’s Vatican decorations. A pioneering project that placed photography at the center of Vatican art-historical documentation, the Vatican Museums themselves today acknowledge Dovizielli as the pioneer of Vatican photographic campaigns on Raphael, noting that his work inaugurated a tradition later carried on by the Alinari, Anderson, Brogi, Moscioni, and others (Di Giammaria, 2020).
The album is extremely scarce. We could trace no other copies in institutional holdings, nor any record in the market besides the present one. Surviving Dovizielli photographs of Rome or the Villa Farnesina are held in collections — Museo di Roma (Archivio Fotografico, Giglioli donation), Fondo Becchetti at the ICCD, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Gabinetto della Grafica), ICCD Fototeca Nazionale, the Getty Research Institute, and the Royal Collection Trust (where his Farnesina photographs, including the Triumph of Galatea, entered Prince Albert’s Raphael Collection). But this complete Vatican Logge series appears to have virtually disappeared. Its rarity may in part be explained by its high original cost: already in 1855 critics complained of Dovizielli’s prices, noting prints at 6 francs each — equivalent to roughly 450 USD today (McPhee & Faietti, 2022).
Born in Rome in 1809, Pietro Dovizielli (1809–1885) began as an art-supply dealer on Via del Babuino, his shop frequented by painters from nearby Via Margutta. Influenced by his friend Augusto Castellani, he experimented with daguerreotype and calotype before adopting collodion in 1851. His shop became a meeting point between artists and photographers, distributing photographic reproductions for studio use. He quickly rose to prominence as one of Rome’s leading art photographers. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855, he exhibited twelve Roman views and won a bronze medal, praised in the Revue des deux mondes for the “warm and luminous tones” of his photographs. He went on to exhibit at the Florence Exhibition (1861), showing Farnesina fresco reproductions; the London International Exhibition (1862), where he was again awarded a bronze medal and praised in Murray’s Handbook of Rome; and finally the Paris Exposition of 1867, where the present series of the Logge was unveiled alongside photographs of Guido Reni’s Aurora, Melozzo da Forlì’s Sixtus IV and Platina, and views of the Forum and Colosseum.
Dovizielli also published a catalogue in 1859, listing 144 views of Rome, 50 reproductions of paintings, and 47 photographs of statues from the Vatican Museums, showing the breadth of his activity. His surviving corpus, though fragmentary, included large-format vedute and reproductions of sculpture. His panoramic three-plate view of the Forum demonstrated technical ambition, while his oblique photograph of the Vatican Apoxyomenos (c. 1865) revealed a more painterly and interpretive style (Bonetti 1992).
By the late 19th century his reputation extended internationally: his works earned medals in Berlin, were acquired for the Tsar’s private library at St. Petersburg, and entered Prince Albert’s Raphael Collection. Dovizielli died in Rome in 1885, leaving a legacy as the first photographer to bring Raphael’s Vatican masterpieces into the modern photographic record.
References: Becchetti, P. (1978). Fotografi e fotografia in Italia 1839-1880. Roma: Quasar; Becchetti, P. (1983). La fotografia a Roma dalle origini al 1915. Roma: Colombo; Bonetti, F. (1992). Dovizielli, Pietro. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Vol. 41). Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana. Retrieved from https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pietro-dovizielli_(Dizionario-Biografico)/; Di Giammaria, P. (Cur.), & Martusciello, F. (Collab.). (2020). Raffaello in Vaticano: La memoria fotografica del divin pittore tra fine ’800 e primo ’900 [Online exhibition catalogue]. Musei Vaticani. Retrieved from https://catalogo.museivaticani.va/index.php/Gallery/641ű; Jarjat, P. (2005). Photographier les fresques de Raphaël au Vatican en 1869: Histoire et usages des images d’Adolphe Braun. Studiolo: Revue d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome, 3, 219–246. https://doi.org/10.3406/studi.2005.1145; Maggi, M. (2023). La fotografia e i pittori, la pittura e i fotografi: Roma 1870-1911. Le relazioni, i contesti, le pratiche, gli utilizzi (Doctoral dissertation, Sapienza Università di Roma, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo, XXXV ciclo, Storia dell’Arte Contemporanea); McPhee, C., & Faietti, M. (2022). In Light of Rome: Early Photography in the Capital of the Art World, 1842–1871. University Park: Penn State University Press; Peters, D. (2011). From Prince Albert’s Raphael Collection to Giovanni Morelli: Photography and the scientific debates on Raphael in the nineteenth century. In C. Caraffa (Ed.), Photo archives and the photographic memory of art history (Italienische Forschungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Band 14, pp. 129–144). Berlin & Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag.
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Price: €50,000.00