Ritratti di alcuni celebri pittori del secolo XVII. Disegnati, ed intagliati in rame dal Cavaliere Ottavio Lioni. Con le vite de' medesimi tratte da vari Autori, accresciute d'Annotazioni, si è aggiunta la vita di Carlo Maratti scritta da Gio. Pietro Bellori fin all'anno 1689 e terminata da altri, non più stampata: E un Discorso del medesimo sopra un quadro della Dafne dello stesso Maratti, dipinto per il Re Cristianissimo [...]

4to (235x170 mm). [8], 272 pp. With 12 full-page engraved portraits, all but one signed by Lioni. Title page printed in red and black with the engraved coat-of-arms of the dedicatee Livio de Carolis, Marquis of Prossedi, in the center. Each life opens with a decorative woodcut initial and a large engraved headpiece, three of which have portrait medallions. Some of the headpieces are signed by Marcus Tüscher. Contemporary stiff vellum, inked title on spine, marbled edges (lacking the back flyleaf). On the front pastedown bookplate of Antoine D'Espérandieu (1846). Some occasional light browning, but a good, genuine copy.

First edition of this series of splendid portraits of contemporary painters engraved by Lioni between 1621 and 1625 and published by the Roman bookseller Fausto Amidei. In the dedication to the reader the latter recalls how, having come into possession of Lioni's original copper matrices, he had thought of publishing them together with the biographies of the painters portrayed. The collection contains twelve biographies of seventeenth-century artists working in Rome, including those of Lioni himself, Tempesta, Cavalier d'Arpino, Lorenzo Bernini and Maratta, all derived from Baglione, Malvasia, Baldinucci and Bellori, but accompanied by new notes. More independent from the sources is only the life, compiled by the editor, of Simon Vouet (cf. J. Schlosser Magnino, La letteratura artistica, Florence, 1967, p. 473).

Lioni was one of the first engravers to specialize in portraiture and he used to make his engravings from pastel drawings. “An accomplished truthful portraitist when he began in middle age to engrave, he clustered dots to model faces and rendered lace and breezy hair with self-taught freshness” (Mayor A. Hyatt, 287).

“Ottavio Leoni was a painter, engraver, but above all a draughtsman. The son of the artist Ludovico Leoni, Ottavio was born in Rome and had high-ranking patrons from a very young age for whom he produced portraits and altarpieces such as Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, Cardinal Francesco Maria Bourbon Del Monte, who as protector of the Accademia di San Luca was able to facilitate Leoni's early entry into the company, Giovanni Angelo Altemps and Scipione Borghese. He is also responsible for a series of drawings on blue paper of scientists, mathematicians, artists and poets of the early 17^th century depicted mostly in half-length form, including those of Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio, both preserved in the Marucelliana Library in Florence. When Fausto Amidei, a Roman bookseller in the 18^th century, came into possession of some engraving and etching plates engraved by Leoni in the years 1622-1625 depicting well-known Italian painters of his time, he had the idea of creating a printed publication in which these portraits would be accompanied by the stories of the lives of the subjects depicted. The project followed in the wake of the traditional art historiography inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari and then taken up by many of his followers over the following centuries, but was given an original twist in Amidei's proposal: the biographical notes to be used to accompany the portraits were already published and written by various authors, with the exception of the life of Carlo Maratta written by Giovanni Pietro Bellori, which at the time only existed in manuscript form. The biographies were mostly extrapolated from Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti by Giovanni Baglione - such as that of Leoni preceded by his engraved self-portrait – from Felsina pittrice vite de pittori bolognesi by Carlo Cesare Malvasia for that of Guercino and from Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua by Filippo Baldinucci for that of Gian Lorenzo Berini and reprinted with minor changes, additions and omissions. For Simon Vouet's biography, which is probably not available in unabridged form, the decision was made to assemble it by putting together fragments from various authors. The volume contains a dedication by the editor to Livio de Carolis, Marquis of Prossedi - a wealthy patron of palaces and fountains between the capital and the Frosinone and Latina areas - and a note to readers, in which the plan of the work and the steps for its realisation are explained” (F. Marmorini, Ottavio Leoni, https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/ritratti-di-alcuni-celebri-pittori-del-secolo-xvii-disegnati-ed-intagliati-in-ram).

E. Esposito, Annali di Antonio de Rossi, Florence, 1972, no. 488; Cicognara, 2304; P.G. Tordella, Volti e storie. Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630). Ritrattista nell'Accademia colombaria e nelle raccolte fiorentine, Florence, 2019.

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