17 - PLAUTUS. Twenty Comedies of Plautus. Venice, Simon Bevilaqua for Marcus Firmanus, September 17, 1499. Folio (318 x 220 mm), binding made around 1560 in red morocco leather, with rich and elaborate gilded decoration covering the covers, combining interlacing patterns with double fillets and volutes ending in empty or azure fleurons, plain spine decorated lengthwise with a floral composition combining empty, solid gold, or azure fleurons linked by thin gilded lines, title in gilded letters, gilded edges.

PLAUTUS. Twenty Comedies of Plautus. Venice, Simon Bevilaqua for Marcus Firmanus, September 17, 1499. Folio (318 x 220 mm), binding made around 1560 in red morocco leather, with rich and elaborate gilded decoration covering the covers, combining interlacing patterns with double fillets and volutes ending in empty or azure fleurons, plain spine decorated lengthwise with a floral composition combining empty, solid gold, or azure fleurons linked by thin gilded lines, title in gilded letters, gilded edges. Collation: A10, b-j8, k-m6, aa6, a-z8, &8, ?8, R8, A-D8, E6, F4. 348 leaves. An important incunabulum edition of Plautus’s comedies, the first to be enriched with commentaries by Joannes Petrus Valla and Bernardinus Saracenus. It is divided into two parts: the first, with its own title page, contains Valla’s commentary; the second contains Plautus’s text with Saracenus’s commentary. A magnificent mid-16th-century morocco binding adorned with a rich and elegant design attributable—both in its overall composition and in several of the metal tools used—to the workshop known as the “Aesop of Mahieu” bookbinder’s workshop. This workshop was so named by G.D. Hobson after a copy of the Basel Aesop (1501) bound for the famous bibliophile of Italian origin, secretary to Catherine de’ Medici, and friend and rival of Grolier (for whom he produced some fifteen bindings between 1555 and 1570). Their great beauty “seems to stem from their very airy composition, in which solid and empty spaces occupy equal importance and area, and whose decoration extends from one end of the covers to the other without any frames or constraints, reminiscent of Italian-style floral compositions with outlines” (Michel Wittock Collection. Part Three, 2005, no. 29). From the library of the lawyer Jean Ballesdens (1595–1675), a member of the Academy, a mediocre writer but a great bibliophile, bearing, as was his custom, his signature in ink on the title page. His library, whose volumes are identified by the presence of this handwritten bookplate, rivaled that of his patron, Chancellor Séguier, who had made him his private secretary and the tutor to his grandchildren, the Coislins. In particular, he owned several bindings crafted in the previous century for Grolier and Mahieu. “As such, he can be considered one of the first collectors to show, at the end of the 17th century, an interest in antique books preserved in their original condition. His library was dispersed in 1676 during a highly successful sale” (source: reliures.bnf.fr). A superb volume, magnificently preserved. Minimal restoration on the lower edges. Ex-libris of Robert Walsingham Martin. Acquired by Émile Rossignol in 1965. Brunet, IV, 706; ISTC, ip00784000; Goff, p. 784; GW, 33990; HC, 13082; Hobson (G.D.). *Maioli, Canevari and others*, 1926, plates 31 and 32; Michel Wittock Collection, I, 2004, no. 54, and III, 2005, no. 29; Hobson (A.) and Culot (P.). Italian and French 16th-Century Bookbindings, 1990, nos. 46 and 47.