Encomia Coelituum, Digesta Per Singulos Anni Dies, Una Cum Veterum Fastis, Recensibitus Victorias, Triumphos, Sacrificia, Ceterasque Res Insignes

Rare illustrated reissue of Giovanni Battista Mascolo’s Encomia Coelituum, published jointly in Vienna and Augsburg between 1753 and 1755. First published in Naples in 1638, the text is here expressly reprinted “ob raritatem & elegantiam” and enriched with a remarkable series of 366 engravings, one for each day of the year. Most of the compositions are by Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, alongside Franz Sigrist and other artists active in Augsburg; the plates were engraved by several burin engravers from this artistic circle.

Contemporary half brown calf. Spines with raised bands and gilt rules, green calf lettering- and numbering-pieces. Skilful restorations to the joints and headcaps. Rubbing to the speckled-paper boards. Pagination is continuous across the four volumes and the collation appears complete; only the title-page to the third part is lacking, most likely omitted at the time of binding. Engraved Froissart bookplate; second ownership inscription of Augustin Sotteau.

The title literally means “Praises of the Inhabitants of Heaven”. Mascolo arranged the work according to the calendar of saints: each day is assigned a neo-Latin verse encomium designed to set Christian virtues against the exploits of the heroes of Greco-Roman Antiquity. Composed in the seventeenth century by the Neapolitan Jesuit, also known for his writings on the 1631 eruption of Vesuvius, the text went through several editions before receiving here, more than a century later, a striking new visual treatment.

This transformation particularly distinguishes the Augsburg edition. Each saint is set within a decorative framework of scrolls, foliage, architectural motifs and rocaille ornament, in a visual language characteristic of mid-eighteenth-century Augsburg. Baumgartner, then one of the city’s most sought-after draughtsmen, supplied most of the compositions, which were transferred to copper by several specialist engravers.

The work appeared at precisely the moment when this professional milieu was beginning to take shape. The Societas Artium Liberalium, founded in Augsburg in 1753 around the engraver and publisher Johann Daniel Herz, financed the undertaking; two years later, after receiving an imperial privilege, it became the Kaiserlich Franciscische Akademie. The four volumes thus preserve the trace of a brief moment when a major religious publishing project brought together almost an entire generation of Augsburg draughtsmen and engravers just as their profession was seeking a new collective organisation.

With its 366 engravings, one for each day of the year, this edition transforms Mascolo’s spiritual calendar into a complete rococo cycle of images; published between 1753 and 1755, it coincides almost exactly with the formative years of Augsburg’s new artistic society.