Torre Farfan, Fernando de la | First edition of this celebratory text of King Ferdinand III

Torre Farfan, Fernando de la 

Fiestas de la S. Iglesia Metropolitana. Seville: En Casa de la Viuda de Nicolas Rodriguez, 1671

Folio (297 x 200 mm). Text in double-ruled borders, title with large woodcut border, portraits, folding plates, engravings; some repairs to a few leaves and minor marginal tears to (count) folding plates, lightly foxed, otherwise clean and crisp. Contemporary limp vellum, manuscript title on spine, fore-edges speckled red; recased, repaired boards, soiled with tears to lower boards and foot of spine, endpapers renewed. 

First edition of a seventeenth-century Spanish festival book with elaborate engravings of the Cathedral of Seville.

Canonized by Pope Clement X in 1671 and praised by Pope Gregory as an “athleta Christi” (champion of Christ), King Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon achieved great territorial gains from Islamic control within the Iberian peninsula and a strengthening of domestic institutions with a deeply religious undertone. 

Produced to celebrate his canonization, Fiestas features several plates of the Cathedral of Seville—the former Mosque converted into the city’s cathedral by Ferdinand III. One plate depicting emblems and devices was engraved by Lucas Baldes—then only 11 years old.

“The best illustrated Iberian book, by all odds, contained in the Harvard Collection” (Hofer).

REFERENCES

Palau 335597; Hofer 86; Praz 397; Campa, Emblemata Hispanica Z29; El Libro de Arte en España nº 82; Escudero 1736; Vindel 2987; Simón Díaz, Impressos del siglo XVII 1304; O’Callaghan, Joseph F, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 160