Rules of the Confraternity of the Cross, in Italian, manuscript on paper [Italy, dated Rome, 13 October 1570] 12 leaves (plus a pastedown and an endleaf at front and back reused from original paperstock), complete, collation: i-iii4, single column of about 27 lines in an italic hand, catchwords on every page and contemporary foliation, titles in capitals, frontispiece with line-drawing of the Cross and the instruments of the Passion, text ending with calligraphic flourishes, watermark of anchor with a circle topped by a six-pointed star (a common type with several Italian examples, see Briquet nos. 477-96, ranging there from c. 1500 to 1565), 'Serra Petrona' in faded ink on frontispiece in contemporary hand (see below), these leaves once kept rolled up and lightly folded at their vertical midpoint, thus small holes and wear there, small spots and stains, else good condition, 260 by 193mm.; in a remboîtage binding, retooled with arms of Catherine de Medici, this most probably in the nineteenth century (see below), scuffs, stains and penmarks, nineteenth-century English armorial bookplate (but this much more foxed than surrounding sixteenth-paper; see below) Sotheby's, 5 December 2000, lot 58. These confraternity rules must have been written in 1570 for a new member of the confraternity, perhaps in Rome, and then stored among his archives and papers, rolled up and slightly flattened, probably in the castle of Serrapetrona, near Camerino in central eastern Italy. Then, three centuries later, they were put into the current binding, with that produced from a blind-tooled binding for a book half the size of these leaves (traces of elaborate tooling on front board), taken off its original volume for its antique leather, turned sideways (hence the dark stain from the original spine running horizontally across the present boards), its original tooling flattened out as much as possible, and then retooled in gilt with floral borders around the crowned arms of Catherine de Medici. The added armorial bookplate of the little-known English collector John Nicholls Browne (part owner of Grenfell, Brown & Co., and recorded as acting for them in a legal dispute in 1837; his bookplate elsewhere recorded by E.R.J. Gambier Howe, Catalogue of British and American Bookplates Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Woolaston Franks, I, 1903, no. 4065) may have come from the volume the leather was reclaimed from, and might suggest a date and place for this forged binding. The nineteenth century saw other attempts to forge Catherine de Medici bindings: see that by Louis Hagué, made c. 1822, and now Folger Library, 227-140q.
Rules of the Confraternity of the Cross, in Italian, manuscript on paper [Italy, dated Rome, 13 October 1570] 12 leaves (plus a pastedown and an endleaf at front and back reused from original paperstock), complete, collation: i-iii4, single column of about 27 lines in an italic hand, catchwords on every page and contemporary foliation, titles in capitals, frontispiece with line-drawing of the Cross and the instruments of the Passion, text ending with calligraphic flourishes, watermark of anchor with a circle topped by a six-pointed star (a common type with several Italian examples, see Briquet nos. 477-96, ranging there from c. 1500 to 1565), 'Serra Petrona' in faded ink on frontispiece in contemporary hand (see below), these leaves once kept rolled up and lightly folded at their vertical midpoint, thus small holes and wear there, small spots and stains, else good condition, 260 by 193mm.; in a remboîtage binding, retooled with arms of Catherine de Medici, this most probably in the nineteenth century (see below), scuffs, stains and penmarks, nineteenth-century English armorial bookplate (but this much more foxed than surrounding sixteenth-paper; see below) Sotheby's, 5 December 2000, lot 58. These confraternity rules must have been written in 1570 for a new member of the confraternity, perhaps in Rome, and then stored among his archives and papers, rolled up and slightly flattened, probably in the castle of Serrapetrona, near Camerino in central eastern Italy. Then, three centuries later, they were put into the current binding, with that produced from a blind-tooled binding for a book half the size of these leaves (traces of elaborate tooling on front board), taken off its original volume for its antique leather, turned sideways (hence the dark stain from the original spine running horizontally across the present boards), its original tooling flattened out as much as possible, and then retooled in gilt with floral borders around the crowned arms of Catherine de Medici. The added armorial bookplate of the little-known English collector John Nicholls Browne (part owner of Grenfell, Brown & Co., and recorded as acting for them in a legal dispute in 1837; his bookplate elsewhere recorded by E.R.J. Gambier Howe, Catalogue of British and American Bookplates Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum by Sir Augustus Woolaston Franks, I, 1903, no. 4065) may have come from the volume the leather was reclaimed from, and might suggest a date and place for this forged binding. The nineteenth century saw other attempts to forge Catherine de Medici bindings: see that by Louis Hagué, made c. 1822, and now Folger Library, 227-140q.
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
