Isabella Piccini (1644–1734), engraver.

Canon Missæ ad usum episcoporum, ac praelatorum solemniter, vel privatè celebrantium.

Venice [Venetiis], ex Typographia Balleoniana [= Baglioni], 1760.

Folio (42 x 29,5 cm). Half-title, title and 140 numbered pages. Engraved frontispiece and fourteen further full-page engravings. Latin text printed in red and black in two columns, with plainchant on four-line staves, engraved vignettes and ornamental initials.

Contemporary brown calf, richly gilt with double borders, floral cornerpieces and distinct centrepieces on the two boards. Raised bands, gilt edges and red and cream block-printed endpapers. Two putti flank the coronet above each cartouche. The front shows a mitred bishop blessing, with a crozier. The rear shows a mitre, a flaming heart pierced by an arrow and a saltire.

               A very rare suite of fifteen full-page engravings by Isabella Piccini, published in a folio edition of the Canon Missae for bishops and prelates, printed in Venice in 1760, and lavishly bound in contemporary gold-tooled calf for a convent.

Trained by her father, the engraver Giacomo Piccini, she signed her early work with her birth name, Elisabetta, and took the name Isabella on entering the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce around 1666. From the convent she worked for more than six decades, engraving portraits, frontispieces and liturgical illustrations for publishers including Baglioni and Pezzana in Venice and the Remondini in Bassano.

Princeton has published an Isabella Piccini inventory of 60 titles, but it lacks the rare Canon Missae with 15 plates that we offer here. Compiler David Rueger notes that the bibliography of Venetian missals issued by Baglioni, Poleti and Pezzana is complex and that illustrations were ‘evidently re-engraved by Piccini with great frequency’.

The earliest edition in which we have traced the complete suite of fifteen full-page engravings is the Canon Missæ printed by Baglioni in Venice in 1731, three years before Isabella Piccini’s death. The series appeared again in 1735 and 1755 and in the present edition of 1760. Six of the full-page engravings bear Piccini’s name in full or abbreviated form. A seventh, the Crucifixion on p. 58, bears the initials ‘P. F.’ The other plates are identical in style, execution and size. The 1731 and 1760 impressions of the plates share the same hatching, signature and fine vertical line just beyond the signature, evidence that Baglioni used the same copperplate in both editions.

Her engravings for the present series closely follow compositions printed in Giovanni Maria Salvioni’s Roman editions. Her Ascension follows Pietro Valentini’s engraving, documented in the Roman Canon Missae of 1722. Her Assumption of the Virgin follows the composition designed and engraved by Pietro Antonio de’ Pietri, which appears in Salvioni’s edition of 1729.

The Canon Missae with Piccini’s plates is sparsely recorded in institutional catalogues, with none of the 1731 and 1760 editions in the US. SBN lists copies of the 1760 eidtion at the Biblioteca del Convento dei Cappuccini in Pozzuoli and the Biblioteca diocesana in Prato. A further copy is recorded at the Abbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Québec. SBN RT1E011178

Provenance:

The heart on the back cover suggests St Augustine of Hippo as the bishop’s identity. The saltire and the inscription ‘S. Andrea.’ on the front flyleaf point towards a dedication to St Andrew. The Venetian convent of Augustinian nuns at Sant’Andrea della Zirada is a possible provenance.

Condition:

Calf scuffed with rubbed corners and some fading to the gilt on the spine. Studs wanting. Sewing visible at either end and the gathering containing pp. 113–116 slightly loose. Some foxing and toning, three short marginal tears and a deposit on p. 40, possibly wax. Three small tears and two repaired tears in blank margins.

References:

Výmola, Miroslav. Olomouc cathedral collections, 2009, pp. 189–194.

Avram, Marina. Terra Sebus 1, 2009, pp. 379–392. · Auctions Art, lot 522 (1731 copy).

Bridwell Library, BRB1254 (1735). · Centre Joseph-Charles-Taché (1760).

Gastaldello, Giada. TECA 3, no. 3, 2013. · SG Collezione Stampe, Assumption.

Italian state catalogue, Theological Virtues (1717) and Four Evangelists (1724).

Paolo Fornelli Grasso, Elisabetta Piccini ovvero Isabella monaca scultora (3 vols, 2018–2024), vol. II, p. 537, cited by SG Collezione Stampe for the Assumption of the Virgin (1731 edition, p. 90).

Princeton, Piccini inventory, see: https://graphicarts.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/158/2021/08/Piccini-inventory-chronological.pdf

Gallerie dell’Accademia, Sant’Andrea della Zirada. · Augustinian emblem (Venice, 1751).