?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
Cellini, Benvenuto (1500-1571) Vita de Benvenuto Cellini, First edition & Pirated edition: Two Copies.
Cologne [i.e., Naples]: Pietro Martello [i.e., Berenstadt, 1728].
First edition, quarto, title printed in red and black; bound in full contemporary parchment; both boards tooled in gilt with heraldic arms of Guasco Gallarati; color printed decorative floral endleaves; old sealing wax inside front board; 9 3/4 x 7 in.
[Together with] a copy of the later bootlegged edition, with the same misleading imprint, but printed circa 1792; large quarto, cartonnage binding of the period, edges untrimmed; 10 1/2 x 7 1/4 in. (2)
"Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Innkeepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of the day and of their subjects. Written with supreme powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, this is an unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici." (Quoted from the Penguin Classics synopsis.)
