24 etched designs for cartouches and other ornaments. Etched text on first plate: All' Ill.mo Sig.r Fran.co Bandini. Humilissimo servitore Giovan Batista Paganelli DD. Agost.o Mitelli In Ventor [sic] by MITELLI, Agostino (1609-1660) - 1650

Sheet size 267 x 195 mm. 24 unnumbered plates of etchings after Mitelli by an unknown engraver, including title etching, on stubs. Platemarks: 241/ 246 x 166/168 mm. Most printed in brown ink (bistre). Watermarks: six-pointed star (cf. Briquet 6033) or no watermark. First plate slightly soiled and with small repaired patch at top and short repaired tear at bottom, 7th plate torn & repaired along inner platemark just affecting top of image, small stain at top of penultimate plate, lower platemark of pl. [15] shaved. Modern marbled boards. Plates numbered 210-233 in early ink. 

Rare edition of a suite of 24 etchings of Mitelli's earliest series of "cartouches" or frames.  Previously unknown, this is the second independent edition of etchings reproducing his designs, following a Bologna edition of 1636, by a different anonymous engraver.

The first etching shows an archway onto ancient ruins with a perspectival view of trees, and in the background a town with a broken tower; the dedication is inscribed on a frieze of broken entablature in the foreground. Some of the plates contain two or three compartments with a cartouche and other ornamental motifs, and three plates are devoted to purely ornamental fantasies of sprays, volutes, vases, etc. The whimsical cartouches incorporate volutes, ribbons, shells, grotesques, mermaids, dolphins, cornucopiae, garlands, leafy branches, snarling lions and putti; most are empty but a few contain further decoration; some are set between pillars or below cornices or statues. All seem to be swaying in a soft baroque wind and the overall effect is hypnotic. That the suite was actually used as a pattern book by artisans appears doubtful.

Father of Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Mitelli père was an influential practitioner of the illusionistic painting technique known as quadratura painting. Four suites of prints were published after his drawings of architectural design and ornament: "Mitelli's graphic output consists of three sets of cartouches and the Freggi [dell'architettura, a suite of 24 etched friezes]. His first set of twenty-four etched cartouches appeared in Bologna in 1636 ... and were probably influenced by Agostino Tassi's prominent cartouches in the Sala de' Corazieri in the Quirinal palace.... Although Mitelli has been credited with originating the asymmetrical cartouche ... and his cartouches may well have been a point of departure for Stefano della Bella's Capricci (1646), his influence remains to be studied" (Millard Collection).

Mitelli drew these 24 cartouche designs in black chalk and brown ink circa 1634. (Only two complete drawings survive, in a private collection in France; another partial drawing in the Metropolitan Museum, dated to ca. 1609 or 1610, shows a vertical section of the seventh plate.) The earliest copperplate version of the series, by an unknown engraver, was published in Bologna in 1636 for the print-publisher Agostino Parisini (with a dedication to Count Francesco Maria Zambeccari). Several issues and reworkings of the Parisini plates followed.* Published descriptions have been largely inaccurate, in part because sets often mix etchings from different editions. The present copy contains a uniform or "pure" series of plates, produced by an anonymous engraver ca. 1651-1654 for the Milanese publisher Giovanni Battista Paganelli or Paganello, who dedicated the suite to Bandini, Archbishop of Siena. It is an original edition, printed from new plates. The etchings are in reverse compared to Parisini's, but are of absolutely comparable artistic quality.

The suite is rare. I locate two institutional copies of this Milanese edition, at the Bibliotheca Palatina in Parma and the Victoria and Albert Museum (lacking one plate). 

Cf. Berlin Katalog 562 (Parisini ed.); Guilmard, Maîtres ornemanistes, p. 314, no. 26 (1st para.); Ubisch, Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung Städtisches Kunstgewerbemuseum zu Leipzig, p. 78 (23 pl., edition unknown). Cf. Millard Architectural Collection / Italian p. 229.

*In the 1640s the Roman publisher Giovanni Giacomo Rossi in Rome acquired the Parisini plates and re-issued them with what appears to be a reworked state of plate 1, adding his own imprint. Sets of Parisini's Bolognese plates also appear occasionally with a title etching or supplemental etching by Mitelli's son Giuseppe: originally produced and published in Perugia in 1653 as a wedding invitation for the marriage of Anna Colonna and Duke Paolo Spinola in Genoa, the couple's arms and the text were erased from the plate for the Parisini series, a fact which led bibliographers to incorrectly describe a ghost edition supposedly published in Perugia. Two later versions, also in reverse, copying either Parisini's Bologna series or this Milanese suite, were engraved in France, where Mitelli's sensibility resonated hugely, and published by the print dealers Paul Roussel and Pierre Mariette; the French series are easily recognizable for their markedly inferior quality.