SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE) - photo 1
SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE) - photo 2
SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE) - photo 3
SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE) - photo 4

SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE)

Lot 27
13.07.2022 10:30UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 37 800
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 794481
Lot 27 | SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE)
Estimate value
£ 30 000 – 50 000
SALLUSTIUS CRISPUS, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), and CICERO, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE)

De Coniuratione Catilinae; De Amicitia and De Senectute, in Latin, illuminated manuscript on vellum [Florence, second half 15th century]

A rare witness to the great Roman historiographer Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy, copied here with two seminal texts by the great Roman politician and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, richly illuminated in Florence for the Ciacchi family.



213 x 140mm. ii (paper) + 58 + ii (paper) leaves, collation: 110, 28, 3-610, vertical catchwords survive, modern foliation in pencil, 25 lines in brown ink in an italicised, angular humanist hand, ruled space: 137 x 73mm., a few early interlinear corrections, headers and rubrics in red, initials in red and blue, 3 illuminated initials with white vine decoration, frontispiece with full border of white vine decoration inhabited with birds and a deer, two putti holding a coat of arms in the bas-de-page (lacking final gathering of Cicero’s De Senectute, some marginal staining and cockling, small tear to the top of f.1). Early 19th-century marbled pasteboards with red morocco spine with paper collection label ‘144’ (edges a little scuffed).



Provenance:

(1) Ciacchi family of Florence: their coat of arms in the bas-de-page of the frontispiece, argent a chevron gules accompanied in base of a mount of six mounts or. This is most probably the branch from the Quartiere Santa Croce, who from the mid-14th century were at the head of local administration as gonfalonieri, reaching the peak of their power in the late Quattrocento under Lorenzo il Magnifico, around the time when this manuscript was commissioned. A Bernardo di Iacopo Ciacchi was Gonfaloniere di Giustizia in 1437 and a Iacopo di Scolaio Ciacchi is mentioned as a creditor to Bartolomeo di Giovanni Riccardi in 1484.

(2) Graf Dimitri Petrovic Burtulin (1763-1849), or Bourtoulin, godson of Catherine the Great, who served as first adjutant of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovitch Potemkin before entering the foreign service (often confused with a Russian military general of the same name who lived a generation later): his printed armorial bookplate. By 1812 his library contained some 40,000 volumes, and was valued at 1 million rubles. It was entirely destroyed in the fire which raged through Moscow when the city was breached by Napoleonic troops in September 1812 (see A.F. de Piles, Voyage de deux Français en Allemagne, Danemarck, Suède, Russie et Pologne fait en 1790-1792, Paris, 1796, III, pp.342-343). Bourtoulin moved to Florence where he began his collection anew, and by his death his new library amounted to some 25,000 books, including 244 manuscripts and 964 incunables. It was dispersed after his death in a series of French sales, in which this volume was Paris, 25 November 1839, lot 2169, sold for Fr 59.3. Most of the manuscripts in that sale were acquired by the celebrated polymath, bibliographer and notorious book-thief, Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869), but the present volume appears to have passed directly to:

(3) The ducs de Luynes: bookplate of their ancestral library at the Château de Dampierre. Possibly purchased by Honoré Théodore Paul Joseph d'Albert, 8th Duke of Luynes (1802-1867). The library was dispersed in 2013.



Content: Sallustius Crispus, Gaius (86-c.35 BCE), De Coniuratione Catilinae, beginning ‘Omnis homines qui sese student […], ff.1-28; Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 BCE), De Amicitia, beginning ‘Quintus Mucius augur Scevola multa narrare […]’ ff.29-53; De Senectute, beginning ‘O Tite, si quid […]’ and ending in ch.22 ‘sic illum quasi desipie[ntem a re familiari]’ (thus probably lacking another gathering), ff.53v-58v.



Sallust’s Catilinarian Conspiracy is one of the great texts of Roman historiography. Written between 44 and 40 BCE, it recounts the plot in which Lucius Sergius Catilina and other disaffected veterans and followers of Sulla attempted to overthrow the consulship of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida in 63 BCE. His portrayal of Catiline as a product of the complicated moral climate of the times is far more nuanced and sympathetic than Cicero’s own self-interested depiction of him as a depraved revolutionary. The work survived Antiquity in perhaps as few as one or two witnesses, which were rediscovered and copied during the Carolingian Renaissance. The text may have been championed by the grand Carolingian humanist Lupus of Ferrières, who records in his letters a search for a copy of the text. The five earliest surviving manuscripts are all from France and Germany and date from the 9th century. Interest in Sallust exploded with the Italian Renaissance, producing over 500 known manuscripts (see L.D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmissions, 1983, p.345, no 24), but despite that, it is exceedingly rare on on the market. The most recent copies, all contemporary with the present manuscript, were Christie’s New York, 24 November 1993, lot 24; Sotheby’s, 18 June 1991; and Bloomsbury, 9 April 1987, lot 269.



De Amicitia was written by Cicero in 44 BCE, shortly after the death of Julius Caesar and before the conflict with Antony and was dedicated to Cicero’s friend Titus Pomponius Atticus (109-32 BCE). He based his work on early Greek philosophers such as Plato and Theophrastus. The text is written as a dialogue between prominent figures, namely Gaius Laelius and his sons-in-law Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola – teacher to Cicero himself.



The final, and incomplete, text is Cicero’s De Senectute ('On Old Age'), written in 45-44 BCE, also dedicated to Atticus. It is composed in the form of a dialogue between Cato, Scipio, and Laelius, applying the principles of philosophy to lighten the troubles of old age, the so-called ‘heaviest burden of life’.



Illumination:

The frontispiece illumination is reminiscent of the work of Ser Ricciardo di Nanni, a priest who lived at Castelfiorentino from around 1430 to 1480 and whose work as an illuminator is documented from 1449. He was particularly favoured for the illustration of classical texts by Piero and Giovanni de' Medici. We see similarly sculptured putti (rather than the chubby baby-faced putti favoured by the other great and prolific Florentine illuminator of this period, Francesco di Antonio del Chierico) and seated deer in a manuscript of Pliny in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, pl.66.9, f.6).



The illuminated initials are on ff.1, 29 and 53v.





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