BOXHORN, Marcus Zuerius [and Tobias FENDT (engraver)].
Monumenta illustrium virorum et elogia. Editio nova. Aucta antiquis monumentis in agro trajectina repertis.
Utrecht, Gijsbert van Zijll, 1671. Small folio (30 x 19.5 cm). With engraved allegorical frontispiece, 125 full-page numbered engraved plates (including 88 with text on opposite page), and 2 full-page unnumbered engraved plates, all showing grave-stones and tombs of famous men. Contemporary blind-tooled overlapping vellum. [1], [1 blank], [2], 176 pp., [37] engraved ll., 8, [3], [1 blank], [1], [1 blank], [4] pp.
€ 3,500
Enlarged second edition of Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn's work on the monuments and tombstones of renowned men, mainly Italians, from Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages until the 15th- and 16th centuries, such as Cicero, Ovid, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, and many others. Boxhorn (1602-1653), a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Leiden, was responsible for the text, while the engravings were by Tobias Fendt (ca. 1520?-1576). Fendt's engravings were previously published in Wroclaw in 1574 (Monumenta sepulcrorum cum epigraphis ingenio et doctrina excellentium virorum: de archetypis expressa) and in Frankfurt am Main in 1585 and 1589 (titled respectively: Monumenta illustrium per Italiam, Galliam, Germaniam, Hispanias ... and Monumenta clarorum doctrina praecipve toto orbe terrarum ...). The engravings were commissioned by Siegfried Rybish, a prominent citizen of Wroclaw in Silesia, supposedly from a series of sketches of funeral monuments, marble inscriptions, and epitaphs, which Rybisch collected on a visit to Italy. For the 1638 edition, published by Janssonius in Amsterdam, Boxhorn wrote the descriptive text and that edition was enlarged to form the present second edition of 1671. The present enlarged edition also contains 2 extra plates.
With the large book plate of William Stirling Maxwell mounted on the front pastedown and a later manuscript note mounted on the recto of the first blank flyleaf. The binding shows signs of wear along the edges and corners of the boards and spine, the vellum is stained and with a small piece of vellum missing along the fore edge of the back board. Some minor browning along the edges of the leaves, otherwise in very good condition. Berlin Kat. 3675; Cat. Kunsthist. Bibl. Rijksmuseum. A'dam II, 3 (under Fendt); Graesse 515; Molhuysen-Blok VI, 178-180; STCN 84190894X (11 copies, incl. 1 incomplete (different collation)); cf. for Fendt: Thieme-Becker 11, p. 386.
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