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 inchesi, 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 — the landmark project conceived by William Young Ottley, collector, connoisseur, and eventual Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, whose stated ambition was the first chronological history of the most eminent artists of Italy ever assembled by a British art historian. Ottley spent years in Rome acquiring drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael, built one of the great private collections of Old Master works in England, and then commissioned the finest engravers of the age to translate those drawings — and the drawings held in the personal collection of His Majesty the King of England — into large-scale plates for the educated public. The project was issued by subscription in numbered parts beginning in 1808. It was ambitious enough to be abandoned before completion. What survived is among the rarest things in antiquarian book collecting.
The engravers were Francesco Bartolozzi and James Basire — not craftsmen hired for the job, but the defining figures of their tradition. Bartolozzi was 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. His first major London commission was engraving drawings by Guercino and the Italian masters in the Royal Collection at Windsor. These volumes are the direct continuation of that work.
What the 304 plates contain — 152 per volume, 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 work are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale Center for British Art's Paul Mellon Collection, the Royal Academy of Arts, 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 handsProvenance: British Royal Collection (drawings source); East Hampton, NY, private Ambassador's library Institutional peers: Metropolitan Museum of Art · Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection · Royal Academy of Arts · The Whitworth, Manchester

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