I have often asked myself: what is the point of objects — the papers, the vellums, the containers of words and thoughts? Why do they matter, when only the words and thoughts count? How vulgar, cultural collecting. And yet objects seduce you, and you enter into a dialogue with them that you did not expect.
I am a craftsman. I look at the world through the eyes of the things I make — the materials, the processes, the form an idea takes when it is built. I collect with the same eye: not a particular category of objects, but those that have contributed to the history of ideas.
Paolo Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino is one of these. It is a text that had to make its way against the authorities who would have stopped it — and that found in its typography a tool of that resistance. This is what struck me in this edition: the care of the printing and the force of the argument hold each other up.
Paolo Sarpi. Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. London: Fratelli de Tournes, 1757.
2 vols.
Composed in the early seventeenth century, Sarpi’s history stands at the intersection of scholarship, politics, and print culture, offering a critical reading of the Council of Trent that resonated across Europe. This London edition reflects its complex transmission beyond Roman supervision. In its measured typography and integration of text and image, the work reveals the book as both a vehicle of thought and a constructed space for its expression.
