We present today a first edition of Ludovico Domenichi’s Italian translation of the two-volume Vitae by Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 45-120), issued in 1555 by the Venetian printer Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari (see the complete description of both volumes of this edition here).

Both volumes are housed in strictly contemporary Venetian bindings by the famous Flemish craftsman Anthon Lodewijk, and likely created on behalf of Giolito himself for a notable recipient. The volumes demonstrate Lodewijk’s more mature, elaborate Venetian style.

The Flemish binder Anthon Lodewijk, or Lowies, was active in Venice between 1553 and 1557. His name is known from a binding bearing his full signature ‘Antonius Lodoicus Flander ligavit Venetijs’ and housing Enea Vico’s Omnium Caesarum verissimae imagines, printed in Venice in 1553 (National Library Vienna, 22.N.2).

He moved to Germany from Venice, possibly around 1558/59, and worked mainly in Augsburg for the refined collector Johann Jakob Fugger, decorating bindings with tools he had originally used in Venice and greatly influencing the German binder Jakob Krause. Ilse Schunke has suggested that Lodewijk may also have been in Fugger’s service prior to this period, and that it was Fugger who may have sent Lodewijk to the Venetian workshop of the printer Giolito de’ Ferrari to learn to bind in the Italian manner (see Ilse Schunke, “Antonius Lodoicus Flander ligavit Venetiis”, Fund og Forskning 3 (1956), 142-161). While his first bindings closely imitate those by the ‘Fugger Binder’ – the craftsman mainly employed by Giolito, and possibly Lodewijk’s teacher – Lodewijk later developed a markedly original and elaborate style, using his own kit of tools. His bindings are highly recognizable thanks to the frequent use of central lobate panels and medallions with radiating tongues-of-flames.

During his Venetian stay, Lodewijk worked primarily for Fugger and bound both manuscripts and printed books. Hobson listed only thirteen bindings created in Venice for other owners, mostly housing Giolito’s presentation copies and thus destined for highly distinguished clients, for example, Cornelio Mussi’s Prediche, dedicated in 1554 to Vittoria Farnese della Rovere, Duchess of Urbino (see British Library, C.69.f.8).

The two-volume Plutarch presented here also belongs to this small group of books bound by Lodewijk for other patrons (see A. Hobson, Renaissance Book Collecting, Cambridge 1999, App. 9, nos. 9a-b). This is, however, not its only feature of interest. Both volumes bear ‘common’ sixteenth-century ownership inscriptions by the still unidentified ‘Pietro Benincasa’ and by ‘Curtio Bertini’, a member of the Bertini family from Colle val d’Elsa, in Tuscany, although the subsequent stages in the provenance of the two-volume set remain untraced. It is possible that by the end of the nineteenth century or early twentieth century the two volumes had become separated, since they re-emerged on the market in separate hands. The first volume was only recently reunited with the related second volume, and its binding narrates a fascinating story.

Plutarchus, La prima [- seconda] parte delle Vite... nuouamente da M. Lodouico Domenichi tradotte, Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari and Brothers, 1555, vols. 1 (left) and 2 (right). — Plutarchus, *La prima* [- *seconda*] *parte delle Vite... nuouamente da M. Lodouico Domenichi tradotte*, Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari and Brothers, 1555, vols. 1 (left) and 2 (right).

While the second volume of Giolito Plutarch bears all the ‘usual’ Lodewijk decorative patterns, the central lozenge panelling on the covers of the first volume presents an ‘extraneous’, or unexpected element:

This unexpected element is actually the celebrated medallion known as ‘Apollo and Pegasus’, showing Apollo driving the chariot of the sun towards Mount Parnassus, upon which Pegasus is standing, and with the Greek motto ‘ΟΡΘΟΣ ΚΑΙ ΜΗ ΛΟΞΙΩΣ’ (i.e. ‘Straight and not crooked’) tooled around: the device or impresa was invented – as Anthony Hobson definitively demonstrated in 1975, in his seminal book Apollo and Pegasus – by Sienese humanist Claudio Tolomei (1492-1556) for the wealthy patrician and banker from Genoa Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (ca. 1524-ca. 1612). It was then used by the leading Roman binder Niccolò Franzese – born Nicolas Fery of Rheims, and active in the papal city between 1542 and his death in 1570-71 – for decorating books from the Grimaldi library.

The ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ medallion stamped on the cover of the first volume of the Plutarch is evidently a counterfeit, and offers a very interesting example of a perfectly genuine Renaissance binding to which a fake modern medallion had been added.

The forgery is particularly noticeable when compared to the medallion plaquette stamped on one of the 144 ‘true’ Niccolò Franzese bindings which is also (we are proud to say) in the possession of PrPh Books, a copy of the second Latin edition of Pindarus’s works, bound in about 1545-47 by the Roman binder for his patron Grimaldi (see A. Hobson, Apollo and Pegasus, no. 97).

Great collectors have always paid particularly close attention to such precious bindings stamped with the distinctive ‘Apollo and Pegasus’, as much for the quality of their materials and manufacture as for their rarity. Moreover, while Grimaldi is now unquestionably understood to have been its patron, this was not the case until 1975, and thus the fine bindings bearing the medallion have long been surrounded by an air of intrigue and mystery.

This highly distinctive plaquette was first noticed by Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin with reference to two bindings preserved in the magnificent library amassed by Lord Spencer (see his The Bibliographical Decameron, London 1817, vol. 2, p. 469). However, Dibdin did not indicate any possible identity for the sixteenth-century owner behind the celebrated medallion.

A few decades later, in 1859, the legendary sale of the collection of the ‘bibliomane’ Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869) took place at Sotheby’s in London. Libri himself, in his preface to the sale catalogue, highlighted the presence of three “volumes whose elegantly gilt binding has never been surpassed,” and which were tooled with the ‘Apollo and Pegasus’, suggesting a mysterious papal physician named ‘Mecenate’ as its first patron.

In 1862, when another portion of his collection was sold at Sotheby’s, Libri first proposed the name of the Genoese Demetrio Canevari, physician to Pope Urban VII, as the owner emblematized by the plaquette of Apollo driving the chariot, and this suggestion was subsequently long upheld in the history of bookbinding and collecting. In 1889, Henry B. Wheatley defined the ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ bindings as the most “rare amongst the rare” (H.B. Wheatley, Remarkable Bindings in the British Museum, London 1889, p. 66), contributing to their growing mythical allure. The ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ bindings became a must-have for great collectors. The renown, rarity, and mystery of these finely tooled bindings even motivated at least two – and possibly more – nineteenth- and twentieth-century binders to produce forged or faked plaquettes that were capable of misleading booksellers, collectors, and librarians, all in search of these rare, even legendary bindings, whose patronage was also later ascribed to the Farnese family, Pope Paul III himself, or alternatively to his son Pier Luigi Farnese.

Comparison of an authentic ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ medallion on the binding of Pindarus, Olympia Pythia Nemea Isthmia, Basel, Andreas Cratander, 1535 (left) and the later “fake” medallion applied to the sixteenth-century binding of Plutarchus, La prima… — Comparison of an authentic ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ medallion on the binding of Pindarus, *Olympia Pythia Nemea Isthmia*, Basel, Andreas Cratander, 1535 **(left)** and the later “fake” medallion applied to the sixteenth-century binding of Plutarchus, *La prima* [- *seconda*] *parte delle Vite... nuouamente da M. Lodouico Domenichi tradotte*, Venice, Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari and Brothers, 1555, vol. 1 **(right)**.

The best known and most skilful nineteenth-century ‘Apollo and Pegasus forger’ was the Bolognese craftsman Vittorio Villa (d. 1892), who established a successful bindery in Milan and often worked for the aforementioned Guglielmo Libri. Another such forger was Domenico Conti-Borbone, who often collaborated with Villa, was active in Milan at the beginning of the twentieth century, and who had inherited Villa’s tools after his death.

As Nixon points out, however — strictly speaking — Villa’s practice resulted in the production of fakes rather than forgeries, in that he would add the counterfeited ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ medallions to authentic sixteenth-century bindings, as opposed to creating outright forgeries of the Grimaldi (or Canevari, as was then generally believed) bindings (see H.M. Nixon, “Binding Forgeries”, Actes du VIe Congrès international des Bibliophiles, 1969, Vienna 1971, 73-76). While we cannot confirm that Villa was responsible for the medallion on the first volume of our Plutarch, he seems a probable candidate given the age and preservation of the finely tooled binding by Anthon Lodewijk. The lobate panel stamped by the latter on the covers of the Giolito Plutarch around 1555 did in fact leave enough space for the addition of such a medallion: doing so would increase the value of the binding and satisfy the insatiable desire of collectors.

The ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ plaquette was certainly carefully applied before 1911, when only the first volume of Plutarch’s Vite appeared, as lot 319, in the catalogue Manuscrits Autographes et Livres rares issued by the Librarie Ancienne T. De Marinis & C., i.e. the famous bookshop opened in Florence in 1904 by the famous Italian dealer and collector Tammaro De Marinis (1878-1969), who offered for the sum of 15,000 lire.

In the catalogue entry, De Marinis does not identify the ‘Apollo and Pegasus’ medallion as a forgery. He enthusiastically praises it as a “spécimen unique” and one unknown to Giuseppe Fumagalli who, in 1903, had described two different types of ‘médaillon de Canevari’, both elliptical (see G. Fumagalli Demetrio Canevari medico e bibliofilio genovese e delle preziose legature che si dicono a lui appartenute, Firenze 1903). The newly discovered plaquette is indeed smaller, round, and with a ground painted in green.

It is possible that De Marinis’s enthusiasm for having discovered such a novelty in the history of Italian Renaissance bookbinding led him to accept a fake as genuine. It is also possible that De Marinis – future author, in 1960, of the monumental and still useful La legatura artistica in Italia – may have had his doubts, giving that already in 1903 the aforementioned Fumagalli had warned against the numerous counterfeits in circulation. Or (more?) possibly, De Marinis may have decided to turn a blind eye toward certain details that help distinguish the genuine plaquette from forgeries (for example the number of spokes in the wheel of Apollo’s chariot, or the technique for stamping the Greek inscription that surrounds the plaquette). Of course, it must also be remembered that the incontestable ‘counter evidence’ to the volume offered by De Marinis as an authentic ‘Canevari’ – that is, the second volume of the Giolito Plutarch, housed in a ‘pure’ Lodewijk binding, without any questionable modern additions – would only appear on the market in 1925, when it was offered in Brussels, at the de Winter sale of the library of Monsieur Alvez Guerra, Baron de Sant’Anna (see Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de Monsieur de Baron de Sant’Anna I, vente du Mai 1925, lot 105).

Notably, however, De Marinis also re-presented the ‘Canevari’ Plutarch in 1960, publishing a full-page image of the binding in the third volume of his Legatura artistica in Italia.

In the related entry (no. 3146), De Marinis refers to his catalogue from 1911, and states that “its present owner is unknown”. The binding is once again described as a specimen of the “Roman bindings called Canevari”, and the round plaquette stamped on its covers is still considered a “unique example”.

Either way, the case of the first volume of the Giolito Plutarch – now reunited with the second after a century apart – provides one of the most striking examples of the persistence and allure of these ‘mythical’ Apollo and Pegasus bindings, and a most interesting chapter in the history of bookselling and collecting.

How to cite this information

Margherita Palumbo, “The strange case of a genuine Renaissance Venetian binding and the modern allure of myth,” PRPH Books, 23 June 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/apollo-and-pegasus. Accessed [date].

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