[Travels Voyages] Anonymous attributed to Noe Bianco Viaggi

Sale 2635 - Lot 300

Price Realized: $ 750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 300 - $ 500

[Travels & Voyages] Anonymous, attributed to Noe Bianco.
Viaggio da Venetia al Sancto Sepulchro et al Monte Sinai, Fragment.

Lacking colophon, likely Venice: Nicolo Zoppino & Vincenzo di Paolo, circa 1521-1524, based on the collation.

Octavo, the fragment consisting of ninety-four of 128 leaves, lacking thirty-four leaves, including preliminaries, final leaves, and text leaves; 114 text woodcuts present in this copy, most small, but some nearly full page, including one double-page city view of Cairo; other large woodcuts present in this copy include depictions of an elephant, another of a giraffe, and one that includes crude figures of a baboon, crocodile, salamander and unicorn crowded into a single illustration; leaves washed and pressed with paper repairs throughout; textblock resewn and housed in a repaired binding featuring the original blind-tooled leather panels re-set into the new leather, 5 7/8 x 4 in.

"While the anonymous Viaggio da Venetia al Sancto Sepolchro et al Monte Sinai, first published in Venice in 1518, was the most popular Holy Land guidebook in Renaissance Italy, the historical origins of the book have never been fully understood. The ultimate prototype for the Viaggio da Venetia was very likely one or more of these illustrated manuscripts, and the original author of both the text and illustrations was the Franciscan pilgrim Niccolò da Poggibonsi. Despite the eventual erosion of his name from the printed versions of the guidebook, the assertiveness and originality of the author parallels the production of other vernacular literature in mid-fourteenth-century Italy. Unlike Latin guidebooks of previous centuries, the intent to include illustrations that re-create the pilgrimage experience and the unprecedented descriptiveness of the prose together suggest that the book can be considered the foundational text for the genre of the illustrated pilgrimage guidebook." (cf. Moore, K. (2013). The Disappearance of an Author and the Emergence of a Genre: Niccolò da Poggibonsi and Pilgrimage Guidebooks between Manuscript and Print*. Renaissance Quarterly, 66(2), 357-411. doi:10.1086/671582)

Worldcat locates one copy of the 1524 Zoppino edition; all editions printed in this period are rare at auction.

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