Beschreibung:

(Rare Books, Maps, Manuscripts & Photographs, 9th October 2019) EMBLEM BOOK: PIETRASANTA, SYLVESTER DE SYMBOLIS HEROICIS LIBRI IX Antwerp: Balthasar Moretus Plantin Press, 1634. First edition, small 4to, engraved title by Cornelis Galle after Rubens, portrait showing Cardinal Pietro Luigi Carafa (to whom the book is dedicated), coat of arms, 7 full-page engravings and 268 half-page engraved devices all within pagination, various further woodcuts and illustrations, including the pasted-over cancels on pp.276-277, colophon and printer's device to final leaves, contemporary marbled calf, spine gilt , some slight nibbling to pp.341-344, occasional light marginal spotting, some rubbing to spine [USTC 1004022; Praz p. 129]Provenance: Stamp of the Bibliotheque du Chateau de St. Marcel to flyleaf Note: An emblem book, this work was enjoyed both on a superficial level, as a moral educator for members of the Court , and as a vehicle for Catholic allegory. In fact, the emblems used here were originally worked by Jesuit artists and subsequently used Plantin Press. One illustration in the work includes a depiction of Francis Line's magnetic clock - Line was a Jesuit scientist himself. The Plantin Press's own emblem is also included on p.382. The author, Pietrasanta, was the confessor of the work's dedicatee, Pietro Luigi Carafa. In the ten years preceding the publication of the work, Pietrasanta has lodged with Carafa in Cologne, campaigning against the Protestant religion. Today Pietrasanta is known primarily as the inventor of the modern hatching method in heraldry.