ARIOSTO, Lodovico; Pietro MOLINI ( editor ). Orlando furioso

ARIOSTO, Lodovico; Pietro MOLINI ( editor ). Orlando furiosoQueen Charlotte's Orlando furioso ARIOSTO, Lodovico; Pietro MOLINI (editor). Orlando furioso Birmingham: John Baskerville for P[ietro] and G[iovanni Claudio] Molini. 1773. Four vols, 4to. Contemporary red straight grained morocco, boards filleted in gilt, spine gilt ruled in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, raised bands, edges gilt, board edges with a single gilt fillet, turn ins roll tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers, green silk place

Queen Charlotte's Orlando furioso

ARIOSTO, Lodovico; Pietro MOLINI (editor). Orlando furioso Birmingham: John Baskerville for P[ietro] and G[iovanni Claudio] Molini. 1773.

Four vols, 4to. Contemporary red straight-grained morocco, boards filleted in gilt, spine gilt-ruled in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, raised bands, edges gilt, board-edges with a single gilt fillet, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, marbled endpapers, green silk place-markers; I: pp. [vi], lviii, 362, with copper-engraved portrait frontispiece by Etienne Fiquet after Charles Eisen, and a further 12 copper-engraved plates; II: pp. [ii], 450, with 11 copper-engraved plates; III: pp. [ii], 446, with 12 copper-engraved plates; IV: pp. [ii], 446, [26 (list of subscribers)], with 11 copper-engraved plates, issued without errata leaf 5*2 as usual; light, variable foxing and browning, slight offset from plates, vol. II with marginal paperflaw to H2; generally a very good, crisp set in a well-preserved and unrestored binding, with all the cancels called for by Gaskell; nineteenth-century ink inscriptions to vol. I frontispiece verso in two hands, ‘coll: perf: H. Drury. Harrow.’, and ‘LARGE PAPER. C. 153.3. from Queen Charlotte’s Collection, where it was bought 1819. bound by Roger Payne’ (see below); recent bookseller’s tickets to front pastedowns.

The dedication copy of John Baskerville’s Orlando furioso, a handsomely bound large-paper copy from the library of Queen Charlotte, later in the possession of Lord Byron’s tutor and friend Henry Drury, with an uncensored plate defaced by the disgruntled engraver.

Among the most accomplished productions of the Baskerville Press, this edition of Ariosto’s epic poem was commissioned by the brothers Giovanni Claudio (c. 1724–c. 1812) and Pietro Molini (c. 1730–1806), members of a prominent Florentine family of publishers and booksellers active in Italy, France, and England. Pietro, who styled himself ‘Librajo dell’Accademia Reale’ at Haymarket, is documented in London from at least 1769 – when he acted as the London representative for the Livorno edition of the Encyclopédie
(1770–79) – to 1795. In his preface, Pietro Molini emphasises the correctness of the text (partly based on Francesco de Franceschi’s 1584 Venetian edition), the diligence of its printer (the ‘notissimo Giovanni Baskerville’), and the collaboration of ‘the most celebrated artists of London and Paris’ (trans.).

This is followed by a detailed life of Ariosto by Giovanni Andrea Barotti (1701–1772), a scholar from Ferrara, whose edition of the complete works of the poet (first published in 1741) was among the first to draw on the poet’s autograph manuscript rather than relying solely on printed sources. Baskerville appears to have printed the letterpress in 1770, while the copperplates were completed by 1774. Each of the forty-six cantos opens with a facing engraving, the illustrations signed by twenty-one artists and engravers active in London and Paris. The designers include Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Charles Monnet, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The result was widely admired. Dibdin described it as the finest edition of Ariosto known to him: ‘Paper, printing, drawing, plates – all delight the eye, and gratify the heart, of the thorough-bred bibliomaniacal virtuoso. This edition has hardly its equal, and certainly not its superior in any publication with which I am acquainted’ (pp. 758–59).

This copy features an early uncensored state of the plate to Canto XLIII, engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815) after Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Apparently exasperated by delays and insults from Molini – who ‘one day in a passion called him an ass, a poltroon, an animal’ (Benton, p. 42). Bartolozzi defaced his own work, incising on the tomb of the Saracen knight Brandimarte the words ‘d’asino, de poltrone, d’animale’, removed in subsequent states (cf. the Princeton copy).

Ariosto dedicated his Orlando furioso to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este (1479–1520), son of Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. While centred on the paladin Orlando and his unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica – which drives him mad – the poem interweaves multiple narrative strands within a famously complex episodic structure. Among these are the trials leading to the union of Ruggiero – a pagan knight descended from Hector – and the Christian knight heroine Bradamante, culminating in Ruggiero’s conversion and their marriage. From this union, Ariosto mythically derives the House of Este. In his dedication to Queen Charlotte, Molini explicitly draws on this genealogy, invoking the ‘heroes of the most glorious House of Este, from which the august progenitors of your royal consort trace their origin, [who] did not have to envy Achilles Homer, nor Augustus Virgil’ (trans.).

This alludes to the eleventh-century union of Alberto Azzo II, founder of the House of Este, and Kunigunde of Altdorf, whose son Welf I founded the younger House of Welf, ancestors of the dukes of Brunswick and the Hanoverian monarchs of Britain. This dynastic connection had long played a role in the political and genealogical self-fashioning of the House of Hanover. In 1676, Sophia of Hanover, mother of George I, commissioned genealogical research to substantiate the traditional claim that her house descended from the Este through the Welf line. These investigations established that the House of Hanover could also claim English royal descent through Mathilda of England, daughter of Henry II. Molini thus constructs a deliberate bridge between Ariosto’s original Este dedication and the British royal family, linking the poem’s chivalric mythology to the lineage of George III and his consort.

An avid reader from an early age, Queen Charlotte began to form a substantial personal library after her marriage to George III in 1761. Initially housed in London, her collection was later moved to Windsor Castle, increasingly used as a royal residence from the mid-1770s, and partly to Frogmore House, which was expanded to accommodate the growing collection. In 1803, the Queen appointed Edward Harding (1755–1840) as her personal librarian at Frogmore, a position he held until her death. The 1819 Christie’s sale catalogue records over 4,500 titles in German, French, Italian, and English, mostly recent publications.

The King and Queen head the long list of subscribers to the Baskerville Orlando (George III’s copy is now in the King’s Library at the British Library; see Bibliothecae regiae catalogus, vol. I, p. 123). This list forms a veritable ‘who’s who’ of eighteenth-century Britain, including aristocrats, artists, writers, and booksellers. Among the most notable subscribers are Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782), Edmund Burke (1729–1797), David Garrick (1716–1779), and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792). Several women are also included, among them Society hostess Margaret Clive, Baroness Clive (née Maskelyne, 1735–1817), sculptor Anne Seymour Damer (née Conway, 1748–1828), and Susanna Leveson-Gower, Marchioness of Stafford (née Stewart, 1742–1805), one of the most influential women in eighteenth-century British politics. The list extends internationally, including subscribers from France, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, and Italy. In Naples appear Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British envoy and antiquarian, and the architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–1773). The subscription price was four guineas or louis d’or with the plates.

Following Queen Charlotte’s death, her Baskerville Orlando furioso was sold at auction with the rest of her books and personal effects, an event that gave rise to a national scandal; after passing through the London trade, this copy was acquired by Henry Drury, classical scholar and assistant master at Harrow School from 1801 until his death, serving as master of the lower school from 1833 to 1841. He was also a member of the Roxburghe Club and Fellow of the Royal Society. Among his many friends were Dibdin (Drury appears in his Bibliographical Decameron) and Lord Byron, who stayed in his house at Harrow and later corresponded with him ‘in affectionate terms and without much regard to the propriety later thought usual to preserve in a correspondence with a clergyman’ (ODNB). Drury’s vast library, including numerous Greek and Latin classics, was dispersed in 4729 lots by Robert Harding Evans in a sale lasting twenty-three days in 1827, and a second by Christie & Manson in 1841, after his death.

Although the binding has been attributed to Roger Payne, he is not known to have bound for the Royal family; however ‘he strongly influenced many who did, more particularly [Christian Samuel] Kalthoeber, who bound many of the books in the King’s Library at the British Museum’ (Davenport, p. 91).

Provenance:
1. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Consort of Great Britain and Ireland (r. 1761–1818); her sale, Christie’s, 9 June–16 July 1819, lot 1766 (‘4 vol. 4to. Cuojo turch. Birm. 1773’).

2. Evidently bought at Queen Charlotte’s sale by the bookseller and publisher Robert Triphook (1781/2–1868), active on St James’s Street c. 1809 and on Old Bond Street from 1815 to 1825, no. 2648 (‘Ariosto … large paper, fine impressions of plates, red morocco, gilt leaves … The Queen’s Copy’) listed for £12 in the supplement to his Catalogue for 1819, of Rare Books, in Various Languages.

3. Henry Joseph Thomas ‘Harry’ Drury (1778–1841), bibliophile, Harrow master, and friend and correspondent of Lord Byron; his sale, R. H. Evans, 19 February–23 March 1827, lot 339 (‘Ariosto (L.) Orlando Furioso, 4 vol. LARGE PAPER. Plates by Bartolozzi, &c. red morocco, gilt leaves, Queen Charlotte’s copy, Birmingham, Baskerville, 1773’), sold for £10 10s (see The Classical Journal vol. xxxvi, Sept.–Dec. 1827, p. 145).

4. The booksellers Dulau and Co. at 37 Soho Square, ‘Valuable and Choice Works’, in Bent’s Literary Adviser, September 1842 (‘ARIOSTO … large paper, … red morocco, by Roger Payne … From the Collection of Queen Charlotte’), listed for £11 11s.

Brunet I, col. 438 (‘belle édition’) Cohen-de Ricci 95 (‘Très belle édition’) Gaskell 48(b); Graesse I, p. 199 (this copy ‘Drury’ mentioned in note); ESTC T133620; Lowndes I, p. 61 (this copy ‘Drury’ mentioned in note); Ray, French 64. See Benton, John Baskerville (1914); Davenport, Royal English Bookbindings (1896); Dibdin, The Library Companion (1824); Schellenberg, Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century (2015).

SKU: 2124605