Second, revised and enlarged edition, the text first issues of vols II-IV and VI-VI and second or later issues of vols I and V (vide infra). The Italian critic, art historian, artist, and bibliophile Conte Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) was born in Ferrara and educated at the Collegio dei Nobili in Modena. A few years after finishing his education, Cicognara moved to Rome, where he lived from 1788 to 1790 and developed an interest in archaeology and contemporary art. Cicognara subsequently settled in Venice, where (after a career in politics) he devoted himself entirely to scholarship and art. In 1808 he published Del bello, a treatise on aesthetics, and from 1808 to 1826 he served as President of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, promoting the academy’s engagement with the public and playing an important role in the decision to open the Galleria dell’Accademia to the public in 1817. ¶¶

Between 1813 and 1818 Cicognara published the three folio volumes of ‘his most important work, Storia della scultura, tracing the evolution of Italian sculpture from the point at which Winckelmann and Séroux d’Agincourt had terminated their study and demonstrating the links between artistic, literary and political phenomena. It is not a collection of artists’ biographies in the style of Vasari, but a fresh description of a historical period that encompasses both Early Italian art and the minor arts. He open-mindedly took into account the writings of controversial authors such as Pierre François Hugues d’Hancarville, Edward Gibbon [...] and Charles-François Dupuis [...]. The work is subdivided into five sections – Rebirth, Progress, Perfection, Corruption and the Status Quo – each dominated by an artistic personality (Nicolò Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini and Canova respectively)’ (‘Grove Art Online’). ¶¶

A few years after the final volume of the first edition appeared, Cicognara began work on this second edition, an undertaking which (as he explains in his preface) permitted him to take account of the opinions and criticisms voiced about his book and to produce a revised, corrected, and enlarged edition. The second edition was evidently well received, and at least some of the text volumes were reissued with the dates on the title-pages amended to reflect this (for example, volume I was first published in 1823 but the copy of volume I in this set is dated 1824). As a consequence of the reprinting of text volumes, sets of the second edition of Storia della scultura in early bindings with mixed issues of the text volumes are known, including the present set, where the first and fifth volumes are second (or later) issues dated 1824 and 1825 respectively (rather than 1823 and 1824). This second edition is Cicognara’s final and definitive text, and it remains a sought-after work; for example, Arntzen and Rainwater wrote that the ‘information in this early history of Italian sculpture is still useful’ while Glass judges that the ‘second edition is an interesting summary reflecting the state of knowledge of Romanesque sculpture in the early nineteenth century’. ¶¶

This set of text volumes was one of a group of works with the 19th-century ownership stamp ‘V.L’ which subsequently passed into the library of the Discalced Carmelite conventual church Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (for other examples, see the second volume of Roberto Bellarmino’s Disputationum de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos (Venice, 1721), held by the Università degli Studi Firenze, and Giovanni Francesco Cecconi’s Il Sacro rito di consacrare le chiese (Rome, 1728), held by the Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln). Santa Maria della Vittoria was built in the early 17th century by Carlo Maderno, and one of the most notable works of art it houses is Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptural group ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila’ (1647-1652), which is discussed by Cicognara (vol. VI, pp. 136-137) and illustrated in plate 3, IV. Interestingly, the 19th-century Italian bookseller’s price for the text volumes alone suggests that the folio volume of plates were sold separately, and the disparity in format between the text volumes and the plate volume makes it more likely that the two would be inadvertently separated; certainly, it is uncommon to find sets of the second edition of Storia della scultura complete with the folio plate volume, as here. ¶¶

E. Arntzen and R. Rainwater, Guide to the Literature of Art History, H 85; J.-C. Brunet, Manuel, II, col. 65; D.F. Glass, Italian Romanesque Sculpture, IV, 1; E. Steinmann and R. Wittkower, Michelangelo Bibliographie. I: 1510-1927 (1967), 467. ¶¶¶