Catalogo del fondo librario antico della Fondazione Giorgio Cini by Dennis Rhodes (review)

When you stand on the Piazzetta of St Mark in Venice, looking out over the lagoon, you are enjoying one of the world’s great chocolate-box views. Dominating the prospect, beyond the gently rocking gondolas, is the island, church, and former Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, founded in 982. For the past sixty years these buildings have housed the Fondazione Giorgio Cini created by the industrialist, Vittorio Cini (1885–1977), in memory of his only son, who perished in an air crash in 1949. Part of Cini’s fortune derived from the development at Porto Marghera of a huge petro-chemical complex, which also controversially involved dredging channels in order to allow large ships to pass through Venice itself. Industry provided work, but also damaging pollution and, by taking water from the artesian wells on the mainland, contributed significantly to the sinking of the island city so that the Cini foundation, established as a prestigious international research centre for the history of Venice and of Venetian art, was also something of an act of atonement.

Cini was a book-collector in his own right, first for himself and subsequently for the foundation, and struck up an alliance with the best-known Italian antiquarian bookseller of the day, Tammaro De Marinis (1878–1969). The purchasing campaign of the two men is a fascinating episode in the history of modern book-collecting and it is a pity that little or no evidence about the relationship has survived. Largely a self-made man and scholar, born into a modest family in Naples, De Marinis trod a fine line with the Fascist regime before the Second World War and with the right-wing Christian Democrats after. His speciality was repurchasing important Italian manuscripts, most famously the Bible of Borso d’Este, and valuable printed books from foreign collections in order to return them to Italian ownership. A practice amply confirmed by the present catalogue, where the provenance index shows that numerous items were once in the hands of English bibliophiles such as the nineteenth-century Dean of Christchurch, Thomas Gaisford (4 books), Richard Heber (7), Henry and Alfred Huth (13), and Charles Fairfax Murray (28). One previous owner, however, stands so far above the rest that he is not even included in the provenance index, Victor Masséna (1836–1910), aristocrat and politician, grandson of Napoleon’s general who, under his title of Prince d’Essling, produced a monumental repertory of early illustrated Venetian printing (Les livres à figures venétiens de la fin duxv^e siècle et du commencement duxvi^e (Florence and Paris, 1907–14), 3 parts in 5 vols), which is still an invaluable guide for scholars working in this intricate field. A part of Essling’s considerable collection of early Italian Renaissance books was auctioned at Zurich in 1939, but not the Venetian editions, which were purchased privately by Cini from the bookseller Hoepli in Milan and transported to the industrialist’s library at Monselice, near Padua. In order to celebrate this bibliographical coup De Marinis compiled a catalogue of the early Venetian imprints in the collection, which in 1941 was published by the most prestigious printer of the day, the Officina Bodoni of Giovanni (Hans) Mardersteig. After the donation of the Cini library to the foundation in the early 1960s, De Marinis continued to supply rare and valuable items, many from his own personal collection. The inflation of the 1970s, however, destroyed the foundation’s purchasing power and since then the holdings have been incremented rather by gifts and legacies. In its make-up the Cini therefore has much in common with the libraries assembled by other wealthy and sometimes aristocratic bibliophiles in the nineteenth century, such as Earl Spencer (now at the Rylands), Thomas Grenville (now at the British Library), the duc d’Aumale at Chantilly, or, at a slightly later...