ARENA, Filippo Della natura, e coltura de' fiori fisicamente esposta... Palermo, Angelo Felicella, 1768
3 vols, 4to (224 x 171 mm), pp viii 440; viii 416; 167 [9], with engraved vignette on first title and 65 double-page engraved plates; some light browning or spotting to text, the plates bright and clean, a fine copy in contemporary Italian vellum, labelled in gilt on an orange ground on spines. £17,500 First edition, second issue (see below) with the original copper plate for plate 9, and one of the last works in the 'florilegium' tradition. Its 65 highly decorative plates, by the author and his colleague Mario Cammerari, in oblong format, are reminiscent of florilegia more than a century earlier. The first volume is devoted to botany, particularly to the anatomy of the flower and its constituent parts. 'In fact, it contains a remarkably advanced dissertation on the sexual generation of plants, including the function of pollen and the importance of its transmission by insects, a discovery that has traditionally been attributed to the German botanist Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter (1733-1806), director of the botanical garden in Karlsruhe. 'The second volume deals with horticulture, in particular the cultivation of flowers. In the first sixty pages Arena describes in considerable detail how to set up a flower-garden... 'Part Two contains a discussion of flowers and their cultivation. The first chapter in this section tells how to force semi-double and double blooms from the seed, and offers a genetic explanation of this phenomenon. He then describes the proper use of the seedbed, and explains when and how young plants should be transplanted... A catalogue of various noble species of flowers closes the second volume.' (Tongiorgi-Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora pp 147-8). In fact this catalogue describes in detail each of the flowers illustrated in the plates. The first plate serves as a frontispiece, and depicts 'Flora, crowned with a garden of flowers, offering floral tributes to three figures - Botany (shown holding an alembic), Physics (who is looking through a magnifying glass) and Pomona (who holds a spade and basket of fruit'. The second plate illustrates gardener's tools, seed forms, and parts of flowers, while the third plate contains parterre designs. The remaining plates are of flowers, several to each plate. 'Arena noted that the illustrations ... would be of use not only to the botanist, but to painters, sculptors, embroiderers and weavers as well' (ibid). Many of the individual flower images derive from Weinmann's Phytanthoza iconographia (1737-45), others are from Ferrari's Flora (1633). The arrangements of the flowers on each plate are however entirely Arena's compositions. The original copper plate for plate 9 which accompanies this set depicts asphodels, asters, and auriculas. Most copies of volume one are dated 1767, and the title is worded slightly differently. Some copies of the plate volume contain an additional letterpress title, but it is often not present (as in the Oak Spring copy). Nissen BBI 48; Bunyard, 'Some Early Italian Gardening Books', JRHS, 1923, pp 183-4; An Oak Spring Flora 38
£17500
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