Scelta de medaglioni piu rari nella Bibliotheca dell' eminentiss. et reverendiss. principe il signor Cardinale Gasparo Carpegna. Rome: Gio. Battista Bussotti, 1679

£1,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

First edition of the catalogue of rare coins from the collection of Cardinal Gaspero Carpegna (1625-1714), edited by the Roman numismatist Giuseppe Monterchi (born c.1630). Much of Cardinal Carpegna’s collection is now housed in the Medagliere of the Vatican Library; it was acquired in 1741/3 by Pope Benedict XIV and included not only coins and medals, but also thousands of tesserae, cameos, small bronzes and jewels. However, many important objects were plundered during the Napoleonic era and are now found in the Louvre. The copy of the Amsterdam merchant, bibliophile and art collector Paulo van Uchelen (d. 1702) and likely bound for him by the great Dutch binder Albert Magnus in ‘horn’ or vellum of a deep yellow colour. As Fontaine Verwey states, van Uchelen ‘had very pronounced ideas’ about how his books should be bound. The 1703 sale catalogue notes that almost all his books were ‘neatly bound in ‘horn’, the spine and boards neatly gilded, and all the bindings so similar that the like of it has never been seen in this country’. Fontaine Verwey continues, ‘this similarity which is so strongly emphasized, indicates that van Uchelen had his books bound, or rebound, in accordance with his own instructions. He must have had a permanent binder to do this. It would not be surprising if this had been Albert Magnus’. Van Uchelen was also once the owner of Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Provenance: Paulo van Uchelen (d.

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