"Tombs of Illustrious Italians at Rome". L’album di disegni RCIN 970334 della Royal Library di Windsor

The volume RCIN 970334 of the Royal Library di Windsor, with the title "Tombs of illustrious Italians at Rome", contains drawings of tomb slabs and Roman funerary monuments, sculpted by various artists and executed with various techniques. The collection is unique in the context of historical documentation campaigns in the first half of the seventeenth century and provides valuable evidence about the appearance of tombs that have since been lost or that have come down to us drastically altered. Traditionally included in the Museo cartaceo, the "paper museum" of Cassiano dal Pozzo, the album should instead be attributed to the historian Costantino Gigli (c. 1590-1666), a figure hitherto little known who conducted research on the history of noble Roman families and the civic institutions of Rome and collaborated in the writing of the treatise "Delle memorie sepolcrali", by the collector Francesco Gualdi (c. 1574-1657). The Windsor codex should thus be understood as a "working tool", eminently private and unsystematic in character, that Gigli assembled from a previous corpus consisting in large part of drawings of fine quality assembled in the early years of the seventeenth century by an anonymous collector, in whom perhaps we can recognize Gualdi himself. The tombs represented in the drawings date to a very wide period, ranging from the thirteenth to the first decades of the seventeenth century; particularly well represented are tomb slabs dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth century, wall-monuments of the Renaissance period, and large funerary monuments of the second half of the sixteenth century. If many drawings are of modest quality, some groups of drawings are the work of skilled artists; some sheets of considerable accomplishment are attributable to important personalities active in Rome between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, such as Giovanni de' Vecchi, Agostino Ciampelli and Nicolas d'Arras. [NOTA BENE: Fabrizio Federici è autore dei §§ III, IV, V dell’Introduzione e delle schede n.° 1-130. Inoltre, sul volume - che è a tutti gli effetti un volume monografico, ma pubblicato come "Volume speciale" della rivista "Bollettino d'Arte" - si trova scritto il solo codice ISSN della rivista, mentre il codice ISBN si ricava dalla pagina relativa al volume sul sito dell'editore Olschki]