Fulvio, Illustrium imagines, Rome, 1517, Nuremberg binding of red morocco gilt for Georg Römer

FULVIO, ANDREA. Illustrium imagines. (Rome: Giacomo Mazzocchi, 15 November 1517)

FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST PRINTED BOOK DEDICATED TO ANCIENT COIN PORTRAITS, in an elegant Nuremberg binding for Georg Römer, with his family arms printed and illuminated on an inserted vellum fly-leaf, as in other books from the library. Georg Römer was a passionate collector of coins and medals. While still a student, he commissioned three portrait medals, and by the mid-1540s he possessed a numismatic collection so noteworthy that Jacopo Strada, Hubert Goltzius, and Samuel Quiccheberg journeyed separately to see it.

For a full description of the bindings made for Römer and a census of 24 known volumes, see Bibliotheca Brookeriana I, 11 October 2023, lot 78; that binding featured the same centrepiece, cornerpieces and leafy stamps, and also contained the painted armorial on a vellum leaf. In the census of copies given in that catalogue, this Fulvio is number 5.

8vo (154 x 104 mm). Italic type. Collation: A-Z⁴ AA-GG⁴: 120 leaves. Architectural woodcut title-border, 2 white-on-black woodcut strapwork initials, woodcut printer's device on GG4v, 204 white-on-black woodcut portrait medallions, possibly by Ugo da Carpi, each set at the head of an architectural woodcut text-border (eight variously repeated).

Binding: Contemporary German red morocco over thin wooden boards (161 x 112 mm), possibly by Christoph Heusler of Nuremberg, centrepiece comprised of four leafy stamps repeated in corners, double gilt fillet frames with leafy tool in inner corners, plain spine and edges, stubs from two pairs of ties, the number 15 written in ink on foredge. (Lightly rubbed at extremities, a few tiny wormholes at spine and lower board edge, vellum leaf with armorial becoming detached.)

Provenance: Georg Römer of Nuremberg, hand-coloured and illuminated woodcut coat of arms printed on vellum and bound at front — Christopher Wenzel Graf von Nostitz (1643-1712), inscription "CWRVNostitz" on vellum armorial, thence by descent, sale of the Bibliothek Lobris (the family castle), Munich, Ludwig Rosenthal, 22 April 1895, lot 1151 — W.R.H. Jeudwine (1920-1984), booklabel, sale, Bloomsbury Book Auctions, 18 September 1984, lot 66 — Pierre Berès, catalogue 77 (1987), no. 39 ­— Jaime Ortiz-Patiño (1930-2013), sale in our New York rooms, 21 April 1998, lot 113. Acquisition: Purchased in 1999 from Librairie Thomas-Scheler, Paris, with their booklabel. References: Edit16 19989; Dekesel F15; Mortimer, Harvard Italian 203; USTC 831110; Binding: A. Hobson, "Some Sixteenth-Century Buyers in Rome and Elsewhere," Humanistica Lovaniensia 34A (1985), 65-67