Stradanus, Johannes

Oblong folio (258 x 358mm.), engraved title with border of animal subjects, 102 numbered engraved plates by Ioan. Collaert, Adrian Collaert, Carol de Mallery, Cornelis Galle and Theodorus Galle after Stradanus, together with 6 further plates on the uses of the silkworm, all coloured by hand, each plate with a legend of between two and four lines in Latin verse, on Whatman paper dated 1819, nineteenth-century green half morocco, [cf. Schwerdt II, p. 226; Thiebaud 858]

The first recorded issue was dated 1578 and published in Antwerp by Philip Galle with 104 plates. Thiebaud describes a late eighteenth-century reissue of the 1580 edition by Nicolaes Visscher. The present issue is an English re-impression on Whatman paper, the captions all in Latin.

Born in Bruges, Jan van der Straat (known as Stradanus) worked principally in Italy as a designer of cartoons for tapestries. From 1553-1571 he was employed by Cosimo de Medici, who commissioned him to make a series of lavish representations of hunting, fowling and fishing for the adornment of twenty rooms in the Palace of Peggio-a-Cajano. These are the designs so magnificently commemorated in the Venationes, blending well-tried renaissance hunting methods with fabulous subject matters drawn from Persia, India and the East.