Antique Folio Books — Italian School of Design, London 1835, 304 Master Engravings After Michelangelo, Complete 2-Volume Set

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Michelangelo drew it. The King owned it. Now it can be yours.

Pick one up. That is where it begins.

… Read more Michelangelo drew it. The King owned it. Now it can be yours.

Pick one up. That is where it begins.

These are not books you hold the way you hold books. At 15 × 11 inches and the accumulated weight of nearly two centuries of serious keeping, each volume arrives in the hands with the authority of an object that was never meant to be casual. The half leather spine is warm and smooth. The gilt-tooled raised bands — five per spine, each panel stamped with an ornate cartouche in gold, Italian School of Design / The Royal Collection lettered below — catch whatever light is in the room. The handmade Florentine marbled boards, deep crimson and burnt amber alive with scrolling patterns, are a complete decorative object before you have even opened the cover. And then you open one.

A Michelangelo drawing is in front of you, spread across your lap at 15 × 11 inches, on handmade paper made the same year Andrew Jackson was President of the United States, and the room gets quiet.

This is the *Italian School of Design* — and its real origin story is better than any invented one. In the 1760s, Richard Dalton, librarian to King George III, traveled to Italy on the King's behalf and persuaded Francesco Bartolozzi, the finest engraver in Europe, to relocate to London. Dalton put him to work on a singular task: translating Guercino's private drawings from the Royal Collection into plates fit for a King's library. The first prints appeared in 1764. Bartolozzi and his fellow engraver James Basire spent years at it, working directly from Guercino, Michelangelo, Domenichino, and the Carracci — drawings that had never left royal hands. The publishing firm of John and Josiah Boydell later acquired the plates and issued them in two volumes. This edition, printed by Lewis A. Lewis of London in 1835, is that same work in its most complete and accessible form: 304 plates, 152 per volume, still carrying the weight of a royal commission a King's librarian set in motion.

Bartolozzi was not a craftsman hired for the job but the defining figure of his tradition — appointed Engraver to the King, elected a founding member of the Royal Academy, and admitted as a full Academician in the category of Painter because the Academy's bylaws excluded engravers and no one was willing to exclude Bartolozzi. Basire came from his own dynasty of royal engravers, a name that would go on to train William Blake. Together they gave the private drawings of the Italian Renaissance a public life two centuries before anyone would think to put them behind museum glass.

What the 304 plates contain — each on its own leaf of thick handmade paper, at a size where every mark the artist made is fully legible — are the private working drawings of the Italian Renaissance. Not the finished paintings. The drawings. The thinking. A Michelangelo figure study in which you can follow the hand. Guercino's figures caught in moments of grief, rapture, and tenderness — a kneeling woman in prayer, an elder bowing under sorrow, a mother turning toward a child — rendered with tonal range that reads as fine art the moment the page turns. Allegorical compositions of extraordinary complexity: bearded elders, angels, cherubs arranged around portrait medallions, the whole vocabulary of the Baroque imagination laid out at the size it was meant to be seen. Landscapes that unfold beyond the page edge — a fold-out plate expanding into something panoramic, a stone bridge, figures on horseback, trees bending in a rendered wind — printed on paper so substantial it holds the image the way a museum mat holds a print.

These are drawings that in their original form now live behind museum glass. Here they are at your fingertips, in your own library, on 190-year-old paper, in the failing afternoon light.

Copies of this edition are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Whitworth in Manchester, and the State Library of New South Wales. Complete two-volume sets in private hands are genuinely rare. This one comes from the East Hampton home of a former United States Ambassador to France — a collection assembled over a lifetime with the eye of a diplomat and the instincts of a serious collector — and has arrived, as the best things do, quietly, through the dispersal of a distinguished private library.

Both volumes are heavy in the hand in the way that serious things are. The marbled boards remain vivid. The prints throughout are clean and bright, the handmade paper thick and creamy with the particular solidity that only 190 years of good keeping produces. One fold-out landscape plate carries an old tear along its fold — consistent with age, fully visible in the photographs, and in no way affecting the image, which remains entirely clean and frameable. A few other minor period imperfections throughout, as one would expect and respect.

Lay one open on a library table.
The room will know it.

The Publisher: Lewis A. Lewis, London, 1835
Binding: Half leather, gilt-tooled raised bands, handmade Florentine marbled boards
Size: 15 × 11 inches per volume
Plates: 304 total (152 per volume), including fold-out plates
Paper: Handmade throughout
Artists: Michelangelo, Guercino, Domenichino, Annibale, Ludovico & Agostino Carracci, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Maratti, Elisabetta Sirani, Pellegrino Tibaldi, and others
Engravers: F. Bartolozzi, J. Basire, and other master hands
Provenance: British Royal Collection (drawings source, commissioned under George III); East Hampton, NY, private Ambassador's library
Institutional peers: Metropolitan Museum of Art · British Museum · The Whitworth, Manchester · State Library of New South Wales

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