In today’s wonderful book there are over Two Hundred 3/4 page woodcuts of gods, from the beginning of Idolatry and from newly (16th century) discovered parts of the heavens and earth. The East and the west, Japan, Mexico. This is truly a encyclopedia forever yon from there pious, to the pagan, from theologian to artisan..
774J Vincenso Cartari. 1531–1569
A TYOHON, youngest son of Gaea (Earth) and Tartarus (of the nether world)
Seconda novissima editione delle Imagini de gli dei delli antichi di Vicenzo Cartari …Ridotte da capo a piedi alle loro reali, & non più per l’adietro osseruate simiglianze. cauate da’marmi, bronzi, medaglie, gioie, & altre memorie antiche; con esquisito studio, & particolare dligenza da Lorenzo Pignoria … Aggionteui le annotationi del medismo sopra tutta l’opera, & vn discorso intorno le deità dell’Indie orientali, & occidentali, con le loro figure tratte da gl’originali, che si conseruano nelle Galleri de’principi, & ne’musei delle persone priuate. Con le allegorie sopra le imagini di Cesare Malfatti … Et vn catalogo di cento più famosi dei della gentilità. Con l’aggiunta d’vn’altro catalogo de gl’autori antichi, & moderni, che hanno trattato questa materia, ordinato & raccolto dal medesimo Pignoria che ha accresciute le annotationi & aggiunte molte imagini.
In Padova, Nella stamparia di Pietro Paolo Tozzi. 1626 $2,500
Daughters of the ocean
Quarto, 9 1/4 x 6 1/2 in 224×162 mm. Signatures: +8 ≠≠1,a6, [∏1 FOLDOUT] A [π2 FOLDOUT]-Z8 ,AA-OO8 (38 pages, 589 pages illustrations, two folded plates) This copy is bound in contemporary limp vellum. THIS COPY has a water damaged title page with loss which has been mounted, the following two leaves of the dedication are also water stained. Aside for the first three leaves (as mentioned) it is a clean copy with large margins and very good impressions of the woodcuts. ( See below for image of title)
¶This is the (stated) Second Edition, but of course it requires a historical explanation. The first publishing of the text of Le Imagini degli dei delli antichi was is 1556, and un-illustrated, In 1567 an illustrated edition was published with 88 engravings by Zalteri. Then in 1615 Lorenzo Pignoria added his appendix with new woodcut images by Filippo Ferroverde and published by Tozzi. There are over 227 images in the first part with Annotations. In the Seconda Parte delle Imagini de gli Dei Indiani Lorenzo Pignoria, in 1626, adds archaeological and comparative appendages, interested in the remote reign of the pharaohs as far as exotic oriental and New World idols are concerned. As well sas 57 detailed woodcuts. Some woodcuts are from archeological artifacts others from newly discovered manuscripts. Portraying Mexican, Egyptian, Indian and Japanese Gods churches and symbols.
In this work Cartari created the first, very successful Italian mythographic manual in the vernacular, widespread and translated throughout modern Europe.
Cartari composed in the book in the vernacular making the text accessible to learned and unlearned alike. Facilitating it to be readily utilized by Painters and sculptors and poets alike. Cartari’s iconographical, symbolic interpretation of the images of the pagan gods as they were represented in antiquity and discussed by Renaissance antiquarians proved to be an enormously popular approach to pagan myth. Cartari’s Alegorical readings as well as the woodcut images were popular and influential.
The Harpies, Streghe and Lamie punishing witches.(fake beauty)
These Images were well known to artists from the sixteenth century to certainly nineteenth century. Some of them include: Shakespeare, Pierre de Ronsard, Lope de Vega, John Marston, George Chapman, Milton, Ben Jonson, Shelly, Rossetti, Blake. Equally as Interesting are the hundreds of source Which Catari refers to or quotes. Eusebius’s Praeparatio evangelica, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Boethius, Pausanias, Macrobius, Plutacrh, Petrarch, Seneca, “Sudias” , Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium Philostratus, Pausanias, Microbius, Pliny the Elder, Seneca, Aristotle, Plato, Apuleias, Plutarch, Eusebius, St. Augustine, Martianus Capella, Boccaccio, and many many more!
The descriptive iconography and quoting of the textual sources is fascinating. The fantastic images, while most borrowed or collected for earlier books, paintings. It is organized into a sort of evolutionary pagan theology beginning with the beginning of Idolatry and a discourse in eternity. Split up into 15 concept based chapters for example Time, Fire/Destruction , Air, Earth, Water .
“In his view, after a primordial phase of truth and pure devotion to God as eternal, infinite, and invisible love and providence, people began to see no further than with the ‘eyes of the body’, and to worship the stars” (von Wyss-Giacosa p108)
Seconda Parte delle Imagini de gli Dei Indiani
Catari’s main source for the American gods was the Mexican Codex Vaticanus 3738. It was created between 1570 and 1589, either in the highland of Mexico or it may have already existed in Italy, similarly as in the case of the Paris Codex Telleriano Remensis; a copy of a joint original draft which Robert H. Barlow named the “Codex Huitzilopochtli”. While the Codex Telleriano Remensis clearly is written by several writers, the Codex Vaticanus 3738 contains only one style, however divided into cosmological, mythological and ethnographical sections. This hypothetically collected manuscript served as a draft for the final work and it is this fact without a doubt which accounts for the great value of this manuscript. The seemingly well-known author, Dominikaner Pedro de los Rios (who the Codex Rios is named after) is responsible for the Italian text from the original 101 folio written on European paper.
¶ In his prologue, Pignoria follows the argument that paganism alias idolatry (whether Greco-Roman or contemporary) is a foreshadowing of Christianity, because these false religions derived from the Christian truth. He was not a believer in polygenesis: and 350 years before Thor Heyerdahl, he maintained that the Egyptians had the seafaring skills to reach Mexico: after all, many accounts of America were thought mere fables until Columbus went there and proved them true. With the “Images of the gods of the ancients”,
There is also a section on Japanese Gods and Egyptians.
Thus, the “Imagini” meet the favor of educated readers and elegant courtiers, painters and potters, poets and craftsmen. They prepare a sort of “user manual” ready with the poet’s ink or the artist’s brush, an evocative collection of “figurative booklets” taken from both the manner of Paolo Veronese or Giorgio Vasari, as well as the classicism of the Carracci and Nicolas Poussin.
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Vincenzo Cartari, Images of the Gods of the Ancients: The First Italian Mythography, translated and annotated by John Mulryan. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies vol. 396. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012.
Praz 36; Cicognara 4686; Graesse II.56; Nagler XXII.15, ; Harvard 156.108; JCB Library catalogue; 2:198; Sabin 11104.; BM. STC.(Ital.) 152.; ‘Choix 4280. See Also: Mortimer, Italian, 108 note. Caillet 2047 (French trans.) Brunet I,1601. Graesse II,56.Univ. Cat of Art, 287. Arntzen & Rainwater H35.Dekesel 16th, C11.
Sonia Maffei, ‘Le imagini de i Dei degli antichi di Vincenzo Cartari: Dalla poesia all’archeologia’ http://dinamico2.unibg.it/cartari/leimaginideiDei.html
Marco Urdapilleta Muñoz, ‘El bestiario medieval en las crónicas de Indias (siglos XV y XVI)’, Latino América, Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos, 58 (2014), 237-70. 5160.235500
Miguel A. Rojas Mix, América imaginaria (Barcelona, 1992) LB.31.b.10858
Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, Through the Eyes of Idolatry: Pignoria’s 1615 Argument on the Conformità of Idols from the West and East Indies with Egyptian Gods
Rosa López Torrijos, La mitología en la pintura española del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1985). YV.1988.b.1010 María Jesús Lacarra, Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, Lo imaginario en la conquista de América (Zaragoza, 1990). YA.1997.a.7376
Mercedes Aguirre at 11:59:11 in Americas , Collections , Latin America , Medieval history , Mexico , Rare books. BL.
Mexican Codex Vaticanus 3738.
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