Description
Venice: per Francesco Marcolini, 1556. First edition, 4to., large oval woodcut printer's device on the title page and on the verso of the last leaf, historiated initials and printed in italic throughout, contemporary limp vellum, over lapping edges, lacking ties, wormholes in the endpapers, with the armorial bookplate of the Electors of Bavaria and the stamp on the title page of the Fürstenberg library at Donaueschingen
Footnote
Note: USTC 819162. Cartari's influential treatise on the mythology of the ancients concentrated on the iconography of the gods, explaining their guises and detailing their several attributes. The book was written to help artists, painters and sculptors, to understand and chose subject matters (see the publisher's preface, f. 3). It was hugely successful and exerted a lasting and profound influence on mannerist and Baroque artistic and literary concepts. It went through numerous editions, some illustrated, and as translated into many languages, including English in 1599. The book became the iconographic handbook of painters throughout Europe for the next 250 years.