Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Giovanni Mazzaferro.
L'Archivio dei Possessori della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana e un nuovo libro della biblioteca di Vincenzo Scamozzi
[The 'Ownership Database' of the Marciana National Library and a New Book from Vincenzo Scamozzi's Library]
[The 'Ownership Database' of the Marciana National Library and a New Book from Vincenzo Scamozzi's Library]
Since three
years the Marciana National Library of Venice has maintained an online 'Ownership Database' (called Archivio dei Possessori), in order to offer a complete collection of
the possession marks found in print volumes and manuscripts not only of its own
collections, but also of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, the University Library of
Padua and the Querini Stampalia Foundation. I am a user of such tools, but I
cannot provide any specialised information on them; for a technical description
of the Archivio Possessori I would
like therefore to refer to a note by the two project partners (Orsola Braides
and Elisabetta Sciarra), which can be viewed clicking here:
For users
like me, the great value of the Archivio dei Possessori is (also) to offer an archive of images, allowing a trained eye
to identify and compare ownership marks. It goes without saying that most signatures,
stamps and margin notes are from 'anonymous' authors whose identification is
not possible. The pictures accompanying the fiches also serve this purpose: to
make it possible to compare texts or other manuscripts which are physically
distant among each other.
And, every
now and then, surprises are not lacking. This is the case, for example, of the
recent discovery of a new specimen belonging to the library of Vincenzo
Scamozzi. In this blog we have already reviewed Scamozzi and the books, a monographic number of the magazine Annali di Architettura with
the proceedings of a seminary on that topic, held in Vicenza in 2015. We noted
that the library of the famous Vicenza architect, intended by testamentary will
to be integrally preserved, was almost immediately dismembered by the heirs, to
cope with the debts that Scamozzi himself had contracted for the publication of
his Idea of a Universal Architecture.
 |
| Vincenzo Scamozzi's ex-libris in the volume marked 146 D 149.2 of the Marciana National Library of Venice Source: Archivio Possessori Biblioteca Marciana Venezia. Licenza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/it/legalcode |
The identification
of the volumes from Scamozzi’s library is simplified by the fact that the owner
used to write Ex libris Vinc. (En) ti
Scamotij on the title page. The international scientific community (in
particular, Katherine Isard) has been long working on the virtual
reconstruction of the architect's library, to understand the intricacies of his
intellectual interests. Up to now, about twenty books have been traced thanks
to the above mentioned ex-libris, while four other now disappeared volumes have
been identified by the sources. Very recently (August 2016) Guido Beltramini reported in the Italian daily Il Sole 24Ore about an exemplar of Vitruve’s De architectura in the first Italian
translation by Cesare Cesariano (1521) with margin notes by the Vicenza-born
architect, which is owned by a notary in Como.
Now we can
add a copy of the De gentibus et
familiis Romanorum Richardi Streinni baronis Schuuarzenauii to the list (which is available
on Scamozzi and the books). It is a 1571
print book by Manuzio's heirs, authored by Richard Strein (or Richard Strinius)
von Schwartzenau, a German scholar of Protestant faith, for a long time at the
service of the emperor and inspector of the Imperial Library. According to a
practice dating back to at least the previous century, Strein was part of a
group of German jurists who had cultivated the passion for humanism and, above
all, antiquarianism. This passion was widely shared - as it is known - by
Scamozzi, who among others also owned The
antiquities of the city of Rome by Lucio Fauno (1553), the Romanorum antiquitatum libri decem by Johannes Rosinus (1583), the Roma ristaurata (Restored Rome) by
Flavio Biondo (1558) and the guide to the antiquities of Rome by Marliani in a posthumous
edition of 1588. Moreover, we also know a good number of indexes (the Summaries), in which are listed
particularly important sites of ancient works. They include the passages
relating to Rome in Titus Flavius Josephus' Jewish
Antiquities, probably extracted from the Li ultimi X Libri di Giosefo de le antichità giudaiche (Josephus’ Last X Books of Jewish
Antiquities), printed in Venice in 1544 (the work includes the books
from XI onwards; Scamozzi begins by citing a passage from the XII book).
Richard
Strein’s volume is kept at the Marciana Library with signature 146 D 149.2. It
also contains a hand-written margin note at p. 32 (available online on the Archivio Possessori). This, in short, is
the most recent book to be identified as part of Scamozzi’s library, but fully
falls in his interests and is certainly not a surprise to anyone who studied him
thoroughly. I am confident that, with the expansion of the Marciana Library’s
Online Archive, new discoveries will come soon.
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