Antiquarie prospetiche Romane

by Ilaria Vercillo

Antiquarie prospetiche Romane composte per prospectivo Melanese depictore (Rome, ca. 1496 – Vol. Inc. 1628)

On the occasion of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death in 2019, efforts have been made to reconstruct the personal library collection of this great artist. The Casanatense Library has actively collaborated in this reconstruction through the loan of important works for various national exhibitions. Among them is this very rare incunabulum, of which very few copies are currently known worldwide.

This is a poem in triplets in which a self-styled Milanese painter describes the collections of antiquities and the principal monuments of Rome with the intention of arousing curiosity and wonder in the reader, placing the little work in the wake of the Mirabilia Urbis. The text is preceded by two sonnets dedicated specifically to Leonardo da Vinci: it is speculated that the contents in this small pamphlet were an accompaniment to a notebook of drawings of antiquities sent as a gift to Leonardo himself.

For years there have been attempts to identify the author of the text hidden behind the pseudonym “prospectivo Melanese depictore”: currently the most accredited thesis recognizes Ambrogio De Predis, a close collaborator of Leonardo. The whole thing is made even more interesting by the total absence of edition data: only through the study of typographical characteristics and in-depth analysis of historical information extrapolated from the text was it possible to hypothesize the year of printing and attribute the work to the printers Johann Besicken and Andreas Freitag.