PIATTOLI Giuseppe Racolta di quaranta proverbi toscani es pressi in figure de Giuseppe Piattoli Fiorentino.

Bobins V, 1509 ; Cicognara 1758; Colas 2352; Lipperheide Jbb 4.

First edition of this very charming – and finely engraved – series of illustrations to popular Tuscan proverbs, expressively drawn by the celebrated Florentine artist Piattoli and engraved by Carlo Lasinio. 

The series gives glimpses of the daily life of all classes of people in Florence, illustrating contemporary customs, and traditions, along with the proverbs. Son of the portraitist Gaetano Piattoli, Giuseppe was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker, he taught drawing at the Florence Academy from 1785 to 1807. Throughout his life, Giuseppe Piattoli, worked in Florence, where he made a name for himself primarily with his genre pictures and series of prints. His reputation was further enhanced by his watercolour illustrations of Italian proverbs which were published in 1786 and 1788 in reproductive prints by Carlo Lasinio. 

Piattoli was a charming artist whose drawings and prints brilliantly captured the atmosphere of his period.

The publishers Niccolò Pagni and Giuseppe Bardi were very active in Florence in the last two decades of the 18th and early 19th century. After Proverbs and Giuochi, they returned again to a similar theme with I contadini della Toscana espressi al naturale secondo le diverse loro vestiture (1796) (See n°5 of this catalogue). All these works involved the professor of ‘carving’ at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Carlo Lasinio, as engraver of the copper matrices or as supervisor of their execution. Giuseppe Piattoli was responsible for the preparatory drawings for the prints.

Carlo Lasinio, a native of Treviso, had been working in Florence since at least 1779. He was a very prolific reproduction engraver, who adopted and reworked engraving techniques with the precise aim of obtaining colour prints. He was therefore a great experimenter, at least until his appointment as conservator of the Pisa Cemetery in 1807, a prestigious position that absorbed his work greatly. He had learned the technique of printing with three or four plates engraved and each inked with a different colour from the Frenchman Edouard Gautier Dagoty during the latter’s stay in Florence. This technique involved superimposing various monochrome impressions, which produced specific colour effects and shading on the sheet. He also used the so-called “à la poupée” technique, with the inking of several colours on the same plate thanks to the use of small pads and templates. For this volume, however, he adopted the more traditional etching, where the copper matrix was engraved with acid, then coloured by hand.

A second volume of Tuscan proverbs, containing another 40 plates, was published in 1788 in a different, landscape format. 

A fine copy.