[Raccolta di 324 ritratti di artisti eccellenti, Florence, 1791-1796], 107 coloured engravings, modern drop-back box

ARTISTS' PORTRAITS

[Raccolta di 324 ritratti di artisti eccellenti. Florence: Niccolò Pagni and Giuseppe Bardi, 1791-1796]

107 colour engravings (including duplicates of plates 156, 200, 238, 245, 286, 308, with 3 copies of plate 273, 2 different plates both numbered 79 and 2 different plates both numbered 170), each approx. 285 x 183mm., printed à la poupée and finished by hand, printed captions pasted on, within frames comprised of printed borderlines, mostly on original blue card mounts, some mounted on later card, modern drop-back buckram box, a few repaired at edges; sold as a collection of prints not subject to return

A fine collection of self-portraits of artists, copied from the paintings now lining the Vasari Corridor in the Uffizi Gallery. The full set comprised 324 prints, though they were also sold as loose prints; the prints in this collection span from Baccio Bandinelli (no. 16) through to David Ludens (no. 314), including Giulio Romano, Paolo Veronese, Salvador Rosa, Velasquez, Antoine Coypel and Peter Lely. Such prints were very popular at the time, partly for the local market and in particular for tourists.

Laura Lanzeni's article describes the origin of this set of plates; many of the plates originally appeared as part of the Museum Florentinum (1752-1762, including 220 plates of artists' portraits) and in the plates of Antonio Pazzi's catalogue of his collection of self-portraits (partly a continuation of the Museum, published 1765-1770). Pagni and Bardi's collection contains almost all the plates from the Museum together with the sixty from Pazzi's catalogue. The rest of the plates were created anew to the same format. As a result, none of the plates has the name of the artist or engraver, and they all have a caption that was separately printed and then pasted beneath the portrait.

This collection is sometimes ascribed to Carlo Lasinio (1759-1838), an artist who published engravings of various works of art, including the frescoes of Raphael and of the Campo Santo in Pisa. He worked for Pagni and Bardi, and his involvement in this collection is probably more as a supervisor to the artists working on the new plates, rather than as the main artist responsible. He also produced another set of plates of artists' portraits with the printmaker Giovanni Pietro Labrelis in the late 1780s.

Regarding the misnumbered plates, one of the plates numbered 79 is of Adriano vanderverff (Adriaen van der Werff) which is no.189 in Lanzeni's appendix, and one of the plates numbered 170 is of Pietro (Pieter) Mulier, no.160 in Lanzeni's appendix. One of the three plates numbered 273 contains the incorrect portrait. A copy of the Raccolta in Florence once had a printed list of contents which was lost in the floods of 1966.

LITERATURE:

Laura Lanzeni, "Ancora su Carlo Lasinio e gli autoritratti di Galleria", Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 43 (1999), 665-691, with an appendix containing a list of all the plates

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