VOGEL VON VOGELSTEIN, Carl Christian (artist); DANTE Alighieri. 
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Carl Vogel’s 108 original drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy La divina commedia ... Rome, Stamperia de Romanis, 1815-1817. 4 volumes. Large 4to (27 x 21 cm). With 3 etched illustration plates and an engraved portrait of Dante, all part of the edition. Interleaved copy owned by the German painter Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein (1788-1868), with 108 of his original lead pencil sketches, pen and ink drawings, watercolours, etc. (mostly illustrating Dante’s Divine comedy), some drawn directly on the interleaves, some on separate leaves tipped in and a few on the leaves of the printed book. Further with a few additional images (including an etched portrait of Vogel and 5 sepia albumen(?) photographic prints: one showing an early portrait of Dante on coated paper, and 4 on uncoated paper showing details from Vogel’s oil painting of Dante and ten episodes from the Divine Comedy), along with many letters, clippings and other documents inserted, extensive notes by Vogel on the interleaves and some inserted leaves, and some manuscript notes in pen or pencil in the margins of the printed pages. Uniform half calf (ca. 1850?), sewn on 4 recessed cords, each volume with 2 dark brown morocco labels on the smooth, gold-tooled spines, the upper with “Divina Commedia|di Dante” and the lower with the volume number and relevant volume title (“Inferno”, “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”), glazed yellow paper sides, green edges, glazed ruddy blue endpapers, each volume with a pink ribbon marker and vols. 1-3 with numerous vellum tabs on the fore-edge and a few at the head and foot. The monumental 1815-1817 Rome edition of Dante’s Divine comedy, with 4 plates and 2082 pages in 4 volumes, interleaved by the German painter Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein (1788-1868), active mostly in Dresden, who added 108 of his original drawings (pencil sketches, pen and ink drawings, sometimes with ink washes and occasionally white chalk, watercolour drawings, etc.), mostly illustrations for the Divine comedy. A few are hardly more than doodles, but many are carefully finished full-page drawings. The dated ones range from 1813 to 1865, but most date from the 1830s and 40s. Four sepia photographic images, probably albumen prints on uncoated paper, show details of Vogel’s colour panel, “Dante and ten episodes from the Divine Comedy” (oil on paper, at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, variously dated 1842 or 1860): one full-page, showing the upper part of the panel (down to the portrait of Dante), another nearly full page, again showing the central portrait but including two lower scenes, not in the larger photograph, while the other two are smaller, showing the scene at the lower right as well as an alternative version, perhaps a preparatory study. Vogel also inserted some images that do not show his own drawings: one is a sepia photograph (albumen print?) on coated paper showing what appears to be an early portrait of Dante, perhaps used as a model for Vogel’s own portrait of Dante. Another is a finely etched portrait of Vogel himself by Johann Moritz Edlinger, dated 1846. In addition to pictorial matter, Vogel added extensive notes on the interleaves and inserted numerous letters, clippings and other documents concerning Dante and the illustrations for the Divine comedy. The drawings also reveal valuable information about Vogel’s working methods, showing, for example, facing pages 71, 74, 82 and 86, four different versions of one scene (where an angel chases the devil away from a fallen soldier): a pencil sketch with a grid, a finished pencil drawing in mirror image, an ink and ink-wash drawing, right reading, and a part of the scene rendered in more detail and in colour. When Volkmann wrote about Dante illustrations in 1897, he was aware that Vogel had added illustrations to his copy of this edition, but extensive efforts to find it had failed, so that he lamented that we must consider this important work by Vogel to be lost. He reported 96 drawings in total, with 60, 20 and 16 in volumes I, II and III respectively. This must have included some items in volume I that were not actually original drawings by Vogel and must have omitted some of his smaller sketches in volumes II and III. Counting only the original Vogel drawings, but including even the smallest, we count 56, 29 and 23 in those three volumes for a total of 108.
With the edges of a few drawings slightly tattered, a few leaves or quires no longer securely attached to the bookblock, and a few drawings affected by offsets (particularly where they used white chalk), but generally in good condition. The boards are somewhat rubbed and the spines show some superficial cracks, but the binding is also generally in good condition. A remarkable collection of original drawings for Dante illustrations by Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein, the “liveliest” (Volkmann) of Dresden artists, long thought to have been lost. Each volume with the armorial bookplate of the German painter Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein (1788-1868), the form of his name as he used it from 1831 to his death. li, [1 blank], 486; vii, [1 blank], 519, [1 blank]; “7” [= 5], [1], 522; viii, 184, 132, 164 pp., plus 3 engraved plates and the extensive collection of original drawings and manuscript material Koch, Cat. of the Dante collection (1900), vol. 1, p. 15; Mambelli, Gli annali delle edizioni Dantesche (1931), 109; Volkmann, Iconografia Dantesca (1897), pp. 129-130 (115-116 in the 1898 Italian ed.; 177-179 in the 1899 English ed.), noting the present copy with 96 Dante illustrations (60, 20 & 16) in lead pencil and pen and ink.
85000,- EUR
inkl. 7% USt./incl. 7% VAT
Sachgebiete: Handzeichnungen, Deutschland, Literatur bis ca. 1900, Renaissance , Aquarelle
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