NATIONAL EDITION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS AND DRAWINGS BY LEONARDO DA VINCI

THE NATIONAL CRITICAL Edition of the writings of Piero della Francesca starts with the treatise on geometry Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus, the first in the world dedicated entirely to this fundamental text by the great artist from Borgo San Sepolcro.
The Libellus, written by Piero della Francesca after the Trattato d'Abaco and De Prospectiva pingendi (both forthcoming publications), was the first treatise on geometry of the Renaissance in which problems relating to the construction and calculation of polyhedrons, which had never before been drawn in stereometric form, were developed. The treatise, which has survived as a single manuscript, the Vaticano Urbinate Latino 632 codex, compiled by an unknown author but accompanied by drawings, corrections and additions made by Piero himself, was dedicated to Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. This work was known from the beginning of the sixteenth century, not as belonging to Piero, and not even in Latin but as part of the Divina Proportione by Fra Luca Pacioli, who published it in Italian as his own work. The plagiarism was denounced by Giorgio Vasari and has been the object of heated dispute ever since.
This new and extraordinary publication was produced with the aid of sophisticated scientific and philological instruments and edited by a prestigious scientific commission composed of Cecil Grayson, Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Carlo Maccagni. It goes beyond a mere reconstruction of Piero della Francesca's original text examining particularly the comparison between Piero della Francesca's text and that of some sections of the Divina Proportione by Luca Pacioli (from the codex preserved in the National Library in Florence).

THE SQUARCIALUPI Codex is the vastest and most refined of all ancient manuscripts of the Italian music copied in Florence during the first twenty years of the fifteenth century. The over 300 pieces it contains - to almost half of which only this source bears witness - are the work of nearly all the most-renowned composers of the fourteenth century, from the generation active during the first half of the century to those still active during the first decades of the fifteenth century.
This limited edition book is richly illuminated in gold and precious colours which place it among the most magnificent works in the history of Italian illumination. Recent iconographic research confirms that the miniatures and splendid illuminations had their origins in the Florentine scriptorium of Santa Maria degli Angeli between 1410 and 1415. At one time the codex was a possession of the celebrated Florentine organist Antonio Squarcialupi (1417-1480), as is stated by the inscription on the first sheet: 'This book belongs to Antonio di Bartolomeo Squarcialupi, organist in Santa Maria del Fiore'. Later it was owned by Giuliano de' Medici and subsequently passed to the Palatine Library; at the end of the eighteenth century it was transferred together with other volumes to the Laurentian Library where it is preserved to this day, marked Palatino 87, and still has its same elegant brown leather binding on wooden boards dating from the end of the fifteenth century. In this edition the codex is accompanied by a volume with studies (translated into English) edited by F. Alberto Gallo.

THE THEATRUM Orbis Terrarum, in the edition belonging to the Istituto Geografico Militare in Florence (dated 1595), represents the most advanced step of the work aiming at the improvement of the mapping technique of the then known world done by Abraham Ortelius, after the first edition of his work published by Plantin's printing-house in Antwerp in 1570.
Ortelius, a great Dutch cartographer and geographer (1527-1598), put together all the geographic and map-making knowledge of his days and reproduced in 147 spectacular engraved tables the most faithful image of the world as it was known in his days. To these he added some most remarkable 'historic maps' showing districts and itineraries from literature, mythology and tradition. The work met with an exceptional editorial success, due not only to the plates but also to the text which is an authentic geographic and cartographic encyclopaedia, with technical information as to methods of projection and names of distinguished map-makers. Because of its value, also due to its exquisite decorations, this work became the victim of continuous mutilations and dismemberment on behalf of merchants and collectors, so much so that today only very few intact copies remain. Among these the magnificent one of the Istituto Geografico Militare, with its beautiful antique water-coloured plates, which is here reproduced in perfect facsimile.

The Codex of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, reproduced here in facsimile, is the final version, the only bilingual one (Castilian and Nahua), of the Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España by Fra Bernardino da Sahagún. The manuscript, now known to scholars as the Florentine Codex, is of inestimable value not only for its lavish illustrations and plentiful information about pre-Hispanic civilizations in Mexico, but also because the Castilian text is the only complete one attributable to the author.
Fra Bernardino was born in 1499 in Sahagún, in the old Kingdom of León. After taking the Franciscan habit he abandoned his family name, Ribeira. Little is known about his religious training in Spain, but we do know for certain that he studied in Salamanca, and that after having entered the Franciscan order he followed Antonio di Ciudad Rodrigo to Mexico, where he arrived in 1529.
The Codex was compiled between 1576 and 1577. The preparation of the work, which Fra Bernardino was commissioned to undertake by Padre Comisario General, Fray Rodrigo de Soquera, dates from 1575. The books are indigenous accounts verbalized by Fra Bernardino from the year 1559. In 1569, after reorganizing and correcting the accounts gathered directly from informers, he eventually drafted a complete version of the entire Historia.
The bilingual Codex, which even in 1585 Bernardino declared to know nothing about, reached the Biblioteca Palatina of the Grand-duke of Tuscany around 1589, probably as a gift from Philip II.

IN 1877 A SERIES of engravings on the subject of the manifold expressions of Arab art that flourished in Cairo from the seventh until the end of the eighteenth century was sent to press by the publishers Ve A. Morel et Cie. Most of these works were created by Prisse d'Avennes (1807-1879), a distinguished scholar who, with the documentation collected during his many travels in the Middle East, gave a decisive contribution to the knowledge of Arabian, and especially Egyptian, art.
In the 200 plates presented by the French publishers, D'Avennes depicts palaces, mosques and minarets of the Egyptian capital with expertise and graphic skill (often livening them by the introduction of various figures in compliance with the taste of his time), dwelling in detail on architectural ornaments, wall decorations and furnishings. Of great interest are also the engravings that reproduce glass panes, fabrics, carpets, armour and the decorations that adorned the pages of the Koran.
Later the French edition was revised and published by the Khayat Book and Publishing Company of Beirut, and it is in this same version, with all care devoted to its graphic presentation and to the chromatic effect of the illustrations, that D'Avennes' work is reproposed today as precious witness to an art and culture of everlasting fascination.

THE SECRET of the chemical composition of china having been discovered in 1709 (until then an exclusive perquisite of Chinese handicraft), the first European hard porcelain manufactory opened in Meissen, Germany, in 1710. Its most skilful decorator and painter, the accomplished J.G. Höroldt (1696-1775) gave his name to a style thanks to which the 'chinoiseries' (fanciful imitations of Oriental models, in fashion since the second half of the seventeenth century) produced in Meissen, soon became the only ones to compete, in the Old Continent, with Eastern chinaware.
This limited edition book (edited by Rainer Behrends, in Italian, German, French, English and Spanish) presents the reproduction in facsimile of the entire Schulz Codex, the celebrated collection of designs and patterns of Chinese subjects used until the end of the nineteenth century for the decoration of some of Meissen's most famous porcelain.

A WORK IN TWO volumes which is precious and unique in its kind: the facsimile of a famous, antique illustrated codex, and the anastatic edition, put into type for the first time in Florence in 1868 by Barbera, of another fifteenth-century treatise on a parallel subject. Indeed ever since the Middle Ages the silk craft had given renown to Florence among merchants all over the world then known. This caused a proliferation, particularly during the fifteenth century, of treatises, written in polished and lively style, often embellished with magnificent illustrations, shedding light on every aspect of this fascinating artistic practice. The edition in facsimile of the codex, which is preserved in Florence's Laurentian Library, contains exquisitely accurate reproductions of the 59 pages of a richly decorated manuscript dated February 1489, once the property of Emperor Francis III, who donated it to the prestigious Florentine library in 1755. The water-colour illustrations provide charming vignettes of each phase of silk manufacture, following the text step by step. This ends with an interesting book of accounts with marginal sketches showing merchants and book-keepers.
The small volume of 1868 on the other hand is the reproduction of another fifteenth-century Florentine treatise on the subject of silk craft that was publicized and annotated by the learned Girolamo Gargiolli who, on sending it to press for the first time in about 1868, endowed it with a documentary appendix, a glossary and a useful index of special words and expressions.

WILLIAM BLAKE'S last great visionary epic was being written c. 1804 and not certainly complete before 1820. It is an extraordinary poetic and iconographic work that marks the climax of one of the most original geniuses of English (and not only English) literature and art. Its originality is in the vanguard of literary Modernism and closely anticipates pictorial Surrealism.
The present book, in two volumes, has been edited by Marcello Pagnini, one of the major Italian anglicists and one of the founding fathers of structuralist and semiotic criticism. The first volume produces a facsimile of the original. William Blake, engraver and poet, invented a printing method which enabled him to create works in which words and images combine to form beautiful and richly illuminated plates. He printed privately his engraved copper sheets and subsequently coloured them. The copy presented here, the finest of five extant specimens indicated by Blake's canon as Copy E, has been until recently the property of Mr Paul Mellon of Washington, who however has finally donated it to the Yale Center for British Art. The present edition of Jerusalem is published in Italy for the first time in its illuminated and unabridged form. The second volume comprises: an ample historical and interpretive introduction to Blake's philosophical, religious, and artistic 'systems'; a transcription of the original linguistic text with parallel Italian translation; an iconographic interpretation; a rich array of explanatory notes; and a glossary of terms, ideas and symbols. An accurately annotated edition such as this assists the reader in his extremely arduous labour in achieving an accurate understanding of the text and in forming an interpretation of his own.