RECORDING THE DEATH OF PALMA GIOVANE
ROSSI, Ottavio, and Bartolomeo FONTANA, compiler.
Lettere del Sig. Ottavio Rossi. Raccolte da Bartolomeo Fontana ...
Brescia, Bartolomeo Fontana, 1621.
8vo, pp. [16], ‘360’ (i.e. 350), [2 (blank)]; printer’s woodcut fountain device to title, woodcut initial and headpiece; scattered light dampstaining and toning, a few marks, small wormtrack (larger in quire K); a good copy in contemporary Italian vellum sewn on two cords sewn in; 1628 note to front free endpaper in Italian, upper cover lettered in Latin in the same hand; late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century ownership inscription ‘Giovanni Maria Gallarino’ to front free endpaper.
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Lettere del Sig. Ottavio Rossi. Raccolte da Bartolomeo Fontana ...
First edition of over 150 letters by the poet and scholar Ottavio Rossi (1570–1630), printed in his native city of Brescia and including a letter to the painter Palma Giovane, our copy with a contemporary manuscript note on the artist’s final moments written mere days after his death.
Bartolomeo Fontana, here both compiler and printer, had previously published Rossi’s account of notable Brescians, Elogi historici de bresciani illustri. Among Rossi’s interlocutors are Francesco Cornaro, Doge of Venice, as well as Lorenzo Pignoria and the Baroque poets Antonio Beffa Negrini and Angelo Grillo; subjects range from requests for books (pp. 38–9, 271) to protection from enemies who have falsely accused Rossi of disfiguring a certain ‘ignorant poet’ (p. 94); Rossi’s paranoia about burglary or betrayal (e.g. p. 110) is a recurrent theme.
Our copy bears a curious inscription by a contemporary owner, noting that word was received from Venice on 21 October 1628 that less than a week earlier, ‘on Monday 16 October, the most excellent painter Giacomo Palma, celebrated in our time, died at the age of about eighty after several days of ailment’ (trans.). Giacomo Palma, or Palma Giovane (1544–1628), nephew of Palma Vecchio, was another of Rossi’s correspondents: Rossi’s letter to the Venetian painter (pp. 154–5) requests a drawing of Venus and Adonis flanked by two dogs and two to three putti, and calls Palma ‘il piu celebre Pittor del Mondo’ (the drawing is perhaps that of c. 1620 now held at the Minneapolis Institute of Art). ‘After the death of Tintoretto in 1594, Palma Giovane became the most esteemed artist in Venice … After 1610 he painted a few mythologies for a small circle of intellectuals that included the poet Giambattista Marino. His fame led to innumerable commissions outside Venice, in various regions of Italy, the Dalmation coast and including the courts of the emperor Rudolf II and of King Sigismund III of Poland’ (Grove online).
The upper cover is lettered in Latin in the same hand, and contains extracts from Ambrose (‘Divitiae sicut impedimenta sunt improbis ...’), Augustine, the Epistle of St James (‘Judicium enim sine misericordia illi qui non fecit misericordiam’), and Bede.
Provenance:
1. Contemporary note to front free endpaper: ‘Di Venetia li 21 d’ottobre 1628 scrivono, che lunedi 16 d’o[ttobre]. passo’ all’altra vita dopo alquanti giorni d’indispositione, l’ecc.mo Giacomo Palma Pittor celebre a nostri tempi, nell’eta sua di circa ottant’anni’.
2. Ownership inscription ‘Di me D. Giovanni Maria Gallarino’, perhaps the contralto Giovanni Maria Gallarini employed at S. Gaudenzio in Novara, Piedmont from 1687 to 1710.
Outside continental Europe, we find two copies in the UK (BL, CUL), and one in the US (Newberry).
BM STC Italian, p. 800; USTC 4008187.
