VASARI, Giorgio. Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architetti [...]. In questa nuova edizione diligentemente riviste, ricorrette, accresciute d'alcuni ritratti, et arricchite di postille nel margine
Bologna, Heredi di Evangelista Dozza, 1647
Rare illustrated edition, revised, corrected and enlarged. For this edition the editor Carlo Monalessi purchased the original woodcuts used for the first Giuntina illustrated edition of 1568 and added several new portraits. The portraits were drawn by Vasari himself and engraved by Coriolanus, while the splendid allegorical frontispiece, to the first volume, was designed by Giovanni Angelo Canini and engraved in copper by Bloemaert. Rubin: “Vasari organized the lives in his book into three parts, or ages, roughly corresponding to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, each defined by their distinctive character. He dated the initial stages of the rebirth or recovery of the lost attainments of antiquity to around 1240, when Giovanni Cimabue was born to kindle 'the first lights of painting'…. "[Vasari's] sources in both writing and painting were absorbed and transformed into new expressive forms, whether on palace walls or in artists' lives. Both were meant to charm and please, to be varied and lifelike. They were true to nature but not idealized. Both were modern. The book was more original. Nothing like it had existed before. Literary friends could offer suggestions, but no plan or scheme or program. The 'Lives' are Vasari's own, and probably greatest invention.”
Graesse VI 264; Brunet V 1096; Cicognara 2391; Choix 15790; Schlosser 251; Patricia Lee Rubin, Maurice Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History, Yale University Press, 1995.
3 volumes in 4to; 220x160 mm. 19th quarter green leather binding and marbled paper boards, gilt ornament, flat spines with gilt titles and rules, marbled edges. Pages [20 including Frontispiece], 76, 432; [2], 2, 543; [44], 407, [132]. Colophon on leaf 3E4v. Copper-engraved allegorical frontispiece to the first volume, 149 woodcut portraits in medallions in the text, within architectural frames, 6 empty medallions. Ornate and inhabited initials, printer's devices at the end of volumes 2 and 3. Some marginalia of ancient hand. Frontispiece trimmed on the upper and external margins, occasional internal foxing and stains on the margins, trace of woodworm on the lower margin of volume I, with restorations on pages 159 and 164, overall a good copy.