Dante on Tissue Paper: The Lacca Povera Divine Comedy, 1757
This beautifully printed oblong edition of the three parts of Dante’s Divina commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) is as fragile as it is incredibly rare. Though it does not contain the entire text of any of those three parts, this copy is, paradoxically, far more desirable and rare. The reason is that the present volume includes only the engraved pages of this magnificent edition, which were commissioned by the great Venetian printer Antonio Zatta for his celebrated, four-volume, and complete illustrated edition of Dante’s masterpiece. Here the engravings were not printed on heavy paper like those which accompanied the full text of Dante’s poem. Rather, this copy was part of a special commission by the entrepreneurial Zatta and was printed on thin, almost gossamer, purpose-made tissue-paper sheets specifically designed to be cut out of the volume and affixed to furniture after the Venetian interior-decorating fashion of lacca povera.
Decorative rather than literary in design, each engraved page features a short argomento outlining the subject matter of every successive canto in septets of rhyming couplets. Next to these appear large-scale engraved images illustrating central events described in that canto. By and large, the engravings sacrifice intricate ornamentation in favor of clarity, simplicity, and expressive pathos within each scene.
An eighteenth-century Venetian fashion, the lacca povera technique relied on the publication of print-quality engravings that could be cut out and pasted onto armoires, cabinets, chests, and so on, then brushed over with a clear natural resin sandracca varnish to produce a high-gloss finish not unlike lacquerware. Because so many copies of this publication were presumably mined for this intended purpose, completely preserved copies such as this are of the utmost rarity. The Hopkins copy contains all fifty-seven plates, including four that were not recorded even in Zatta’s own original eighteenth-century catalogue describing the publication. Each plate contains two engravings, endowing the entire volume with a staggering 228 illustrations in all. In short, this was a book designed to self-destruct, making the Hopkins copy a remarkable accident of survival, as well as an enduring record of the applied dynamic adaptation and consumption of literary texts within everyday domestic life.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Cordula Bischoff and Nicola Imrie, “Presents for Princesses: Gender in Royal Receiving and Giving,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 15:1 (Fall–Winter 2007–8): esp. 37–40; Caroline Duer, “The Art of Découpage,” The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 19:3 (July 1932): 110–13; Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide, “‘Cutting up Berchems, Watteaus, and Audrans’: A ‘Lacca Povera’ Secretary at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 31 (1996): esp. 81–83.
