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Seventeenth-Century Italian Drawing Books: Their Origin and Development, in: “Children<br />
of Mercury. The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”,<br />
Providence, RI, 1984, pp. 108-118, especially p. 111).<br />
The first series is dated 1619, the second is undated. The first series was issued at a time<br />
when Giuseppe il Vecchio de Rossi (1560-1639) was still in charge of the ‘Calcografia’.<br />
His son Giovanni Domenico (1619-1653) took over in 1639 and ran the workshop Alla<br />
Pace with his mother until 1648. He must have commissioned the second series to<br />
Francesco Curti between 1648 and 1653, because the series is not mentioned in the<br />
inventory of 1648 in which the inheritance of Giuseppe, who died in 1639, and all what<br />
the shop had bought from then to 1648, was recorded. Giuseppe’s inheritance was<br />
divided among his four sons: Giovanni Domenico, Giovanni Giacomo, Girolamo and<br />
Filippo. However, both series are mentioned in another inventory set up in 1653 after<br />
the death of Giovanni Domenico and his wife. From these two documents it is apparent<br />
that Gatti’s series was in Giovanni Giacomo’s possession already in 1648, while Curti’s<br />
series entered his stock only in 1653 after his brother’s death. So when the coppers<br />
came into his possession, Gian Giacomo de Rossi (1627-1691) added his address on the<br />
dedication pages of both series and the inscription “questo è il vero originale” only on<br />
that of Gatti’s series (cf. F. Consagra, The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop. A Study<br />
in the History of Print Industry in Seventeenth-Century Rome, Ann Arbor, MI, 1993, pp.<br />
300, 505, 542).<br />
The copper matrices of both series are listed in all the Indici delle stampe that Giovanni<br />
Giacomo published during his lifetime, starting from that of 1677 (p. 29). They are also<br />
present in the final Indice (p. 51) that Lorenzo Filippo de Rossi drew in 1735, three years<br />
before the entire collection of the family was bought by order of Pope Clemens XII and<br />
entered the Calcografia Camerale, where it is still preserved today (cfr. A. Grelle Iusco,<br />
La Stamperia ‘alla Pace’ di Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi e dei suoi eredi: dall’INDICE alla raccolta
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