Beschreibung:

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 H