Rodger Friedman
Prevented from publishing “important” books (which by Venetian law could not be printed in the provinces), the Remondini family of Bassano del Grappa turned to printing popular titles on cheap paper, usually featuring woodcut illustrations. As the firm grew in the 1700s, it expanded into color woodcut designs for decorating paper that was widely used for book covers, wallpaper, and other applications. A few years ago, I noticed that I kept acquiring books and pamphlets bound in Remondini decorated paper (or paper in the Remondini style), regardless of the contents. I found them beautiful and imaginative. My attraction to them turned into a “collection” without me realizing it.
A couple of years ago, my wife Kiki and I visited the town of Bassano del Grappa, where the Remondini lived and thrived. The local museum houses many of the original woodblocks that were used to decorate Remondini paper. The blocks had been lost, but they were recovered in the early 1950s —found abandoned in a garage in another city. The man who found them, Giorgio Tassotti, now runs a firm that produces decorated paper, including modern reproductions of Remondini designs.
Johann Simon Mayr (1763-1845); [Giuseppe Maria Foppa].
David in spelunca Engaddi, actio sacra pro filiabus chori S. Lazari Mendicantium...
Venice, 1795.
Libretto of the 1795 oratorio (David in the Cave of Engedi) by the German-born composer Simon Mayr who emigrated to Italy at age 25 and, as choirmaster at Bergamo, was Donizetti’s music teacher. The oratorio was first performed in Venice with this libretto, apparently by Giuseppe Foppa. Bound in genuine Remondini 3-color woodblock wraps (illustrated in Milano and Villani, Le carte decorate della Raccolta Bertarelli, #59).
Luigi Pagani Cesa, and others.
La virtù, e la riconoscenza…
Belluno: per Simone Tissi, 1791.
Collection of poems, dramatic narratives, and orations by various authors to honor the end of a local dignitary’s term in office as “podesta” (roughly, mayor). The dignitary in question, Alessandro Contarini, came from one of the founding families of the Venetian Republic, which was about to end in 1799 when Napoleon’s armies dissolved it. The paper covers, printed with Remondini blocks and subsequently hand-colored with red and ochre tints, exhibit a design that the firm used frequently in various incarnations over the years. It is reproduced in Remondini: un editore del settecento, p. 117, #27.
Francesco Algarotti.
Il congresso di Citera.
London, 1763.
Sixth edition, the first to include the “Giudizio d’Amore.” One of the defining voices of the Italian enlightenment, Francesco Algarotti traveled widely through the courts and capitals of Europe, associating with its principal scientists, artists, and intellectuals. In Great Britain, he was made a member of the Royal Society, engaged with Alexander Pope, and frequented the salon of Mary Wortley Montagu and John Hervey. (Montagu became the centerpiece of Algarotti’s popular Newtonianismo per le dame.) The work presented here is a novelistic essay (or a didactic novel) on love and courtship in the various nations of Europe and elsewhere. Expert authorities on “love” meet on the Aegean island of Cithera, home of Aphrodite, for their symposium. Algarotti continued to revise and expand the text through its various editions, until this, the London edition of 1763, which is considered definitive. I have not yet pinned down a reference for the paper, but it bears all the hallmarks of a Remondini product: the distinctive tints, the hand-finishing, and the happy design.