Press Release Auction 68

Gonnelli Cas d’Aste is preparing for its spring auction of Books, Autographs, and Manuscripts, which will take place from the afternoon of Tuesday, March 3rd to Thursday, March 5th at its headquarters at Via Fra' Giovanni Angelico 49 in Florence. Over the three days of the auction, 566 lots will be offered, divided into five sessions. 

The first session, dedicated to Autographs, Manuscripts, Music, Orientalia, Futurism, and the Twentieth Century (lots 1-100), opens with a highly anticipated Photography section, including a highlight: Bert Underwood's Collection of 76 Stereoscopic Photographs of Late-19th-Century Italy, with original stereoscope (lot 2, starting price €400).
Among the Autographs, standouts include two exuberant autographed letters by Antonio Canova, 1804 (lot 15, starting price €700); the beautiful photographic portrait with autograph dedication of Gabriele D'Annunzio in lieutenant colonel's uniform, 1920 (lot 20, starting price €300); and the photo portrait with autograph dedication of Thomas Mann, 1940s-1950s (lot 25, starting price €260).

The Manuscripts section is dominated by the manuscript of the Dialoghi di San Gregorio volgarizzati da Domenico Cavalca, 1446 (lot 32, starting price €2,500), one of the foundational texts of early Italian prose, and the Antica copia notarile della bolla di papa Zaccaria per l’abbazia di Montecassino from 1357 (lot 30, starting price €700), a key document in the history of Western monasticism.

The Music section stands out for the historical and emotional intensity of the signed autograph letter sent by Giuseppe Verdi to Cesare Vigna, August 16, 1879, a document related to the benefit concert held at La Scala to benefit the people affected by the flooding of the Po River (lot 59, starting price €600).

The evocative Orientalia section features: the 18th-century Maghreb Koran, 1745, a refined example of North African calligraphy and decoration (lot 63, starting price €1,800), the sumptuous Ottoman manuscript Koran, Anatolia, 1823, a masterpiece of illuminated manuscripts of great formal elegance (lot 65, starting price €1,500), and the imposing Cairo edition of the Thousand and One Nights, Kitab Alf Layla wa Layla, edited by Muhammad Qutta al-‘Adawi, 1862 (lot 69, starting price €11,000). 

In the section dedicated to Futurism and the Twentieth Century, there is a special deluxe edition of Collodi's Avventure di Pinocchio, Florence, 1955 (lot 82, starting price €400), embellished with hand-carved wooden figures. Among the Futurist works, noteworthy are Francesco Cangiullo's Caffeconcerto (lot 79, starting price €280), and two works by Fortunato Depero: Bilancio 1913-1936, hand-signed (lot 83, starting price €380), and Fortunato Depero nelle opere e nella vita, 1940 (lot 84, starting price €300), with a beautiful hand-written dedication "to my first translator." Among the first editions, the most notable are Ultime cose (1935-1938) by Umberto Saba, with the editorial band (lot 98, starting price €400), and the first Italian edition of Il Piccolo Principe by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Milan, 1949 (lot 99, starting price €260), with the very rare illustrated dust jacket.

The second session of Art Books and Anastatics; Cento Amici del Libro (lots 101-224) opens with the section dedicated to Art Books, dominated by Alighiero Boetti's most ambitious project, Classifying the Thousand Longest Rivers in the World, 1977 (lot 121, starting price €2,000), with a dedication from the artist. Also noteworthy: Verve, vol. VII, nos. 27-28 from 1953, the first edition of this magnificent double issue with lithographs by Chagall, Braque, Matisse, Léger, etc. (lot 124, starting price €340); Manifiesto blanco 1946, a 1966 reprint of the text that marked the birth of Lucio Fontana's Spatialism (lot 130, starting price €180); and the very rare programme published for the first performance of Shakespeare's Come vi piace (As You Like It) at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome in 1948, with staging by Visconti, and with sets and costumes by Salvador Dalì (lot 157, starting price €120).

To follow, we present a collection of Cento Amici del Libro, organized in chronological order from 1939 to 2023, which includes some of the most recent titles as well as classics such as: Sette frammenti, [2004], with the iconic relief engravings by Arnaldo Pomodoro (lot 210, starting price €800); Vetrinetta accidentale, 2005, with textured colour engravings by Walter Valentini (lot 211, starting price €280); and I cinque Isgrò, 2006, (lot 213, starting price €240).

The third session of Astronomy, Physics, Geometry and Mathematics (lots 225-394) is exceptional, hosting a selection of books from the collection of the eminent mathematician Enrico Giusti (1940-2024). In it we find volumes that offer an extraordinary journey through the peaks of European scientific thought starting from the extremely rare Tractatus de latitudinibus formarum by Nicole Oresme from 1486 (lot 355, starting price €4,000), a work at the origins of analytic geometry. Among the top lots we point out: a first edition in white and contemporary hardback of Cavalieri's Geometria indivisibilibus, 1635, a founding text of mathematics (lot 267, starting price €18,000), and, also by Cavalieri, the rare first edition of Exercitationes geometricae sex from 1647 (lot 269, starting price €6,000); the 1615 first edition of Galileo Galilei's seminal work on the physics of floating bodies, Risposta alle opposizioni…, published under the name of his student and friend Benedetto Castelli (lot 314, starting price €10,000); the first edition of Francesco Maria Grimaldi's Physico-mathesis de lumine, coloribus, et iride, 1665 (lot 320, starting price €8,500), a treatise describing the revolutionary discovery of the diffraction of light and which would be cited by Isaac Newton; a rare set of two first editions by André Tacquet on cylinders and rings, Cylindricorum et annularium libri IV and liber quintus addendus, 1651 and 1659 (lot 380, starting price €6,000); and finally a very large copy of the largest book printed by Aldus Manutius, De expetendis, et fugiendis rebus opus of December 1501, an indispensable compendium of the knowledge of the time (lot 385, starting price €13,000).

The fourth and fifth sessions, dedicated to Incunabula and Post-Incunabula; Printed Books from the 16th to 19th Centuries (lots 395-566), open with a selection of Incunabula and Post-Incunabula, dominated by the extremely rare “editio princeps” of Plato's Timaeus, Critias, De legibus, and Epistles, published in Florence between 1484 and 1485 (lot 397, starting price €45,000). This is a perfect fit for this highly scientific auction, given that the Timaeus first attributes the task of explaining natural phenomena to mathematics. Among the printed books from the 16th to the 19th century, we would first like to point out the Giornale overo descrizionezione del faticosissimo, & trauagliosissimo viaggio, an unobtainable Italian translation from 1621 of the travel journal of the Dutchman Willen Schouten, who rounded Cape Horn, giving it the name of his hometown (lot 502, starting price €25,000). The following top lots are: a precious copy of the extremely rare “Ventisettana” of the Decameron (lot 429, starting price €5,000); the complete edition of Cardano's works, from the Macclesfield collection, 1663 (lot 477, starting price €5,000); the splendid Atlante Veneto by Coronelli, 1690 (lot 479, starting price €18,000); a copy of Jansson's “Waterworld,” the first true marine atlas, 1657 (lot 489, starting price €9,000); and finally the unmissable set of three extremely rare first editions dedicated to the revolutionary discovery of animal electricity, which opens with Luigi Galvani's De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari, an issue with the title page and pages numbered 1 to 58, complete with 4 copperplate plates (lot 521, starting price €18,000).

In addition to these top lots, the auction is, as always, packed with curiosities for all tastes and budgets, such as the delightful Chewing Poem. Poesia da masticare from the 1970s (lot 148, starting price €140), or the 18th-century booklet Il paroco all'infermo in pericolo di morte featuring a fantastic handwritten note at the end with an "Exorcism against Demons" (lot 512, starting price €100).