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Pompilio Totti: Publisher, Engraver, Roman Antiquary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 August 2013
Extract
The traveller who leaves Spoleto in a north-easterly direction by the Norcia road soon comes to the village of Cerreto di Spoleto, most renowned as the birthplace of the famous humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano in 1429, but also the home of the Totti family for several centuries. The earliest member known to us by name is one Totto Totti, married to a lady named Isolda, whom Pontano addresses in one of his Tumulorum epigrammata, Book II, which was written about 1490 or 1500.
Pompilio Totti was born at Cerreto, presumably about 1590, and is in his books always proud to proclaim himself a native of ‘Cerreto nell'Umbria,’ as is also his kinsman Sebastiano. As an Umbrian, Pompilio is given a brief entry in the earliest published Umbrian bibliography, as follows:
‘Pompilius Tottus Ceretanus edidit Ristretto delle grandezze di Roma. Rome an. 1637. apud Vitalem Mascardum, & alia.’
The exact date of his arrival in Rome is unknown, but he makes his first appearance in print in 1622, or possibly 1623, when he writes the preface for an edition of the manual on the nature and care of horses originally written by Agostino Colombre, a native of San Severo, whose book had been first printed in Venice as early as 1536.
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- Copyright © British School at Rome 1969
References
1 Monti, Salvatore, ‘Il problema dell'anno di nascita di Gioviano Pontano,’ Atti della Accademia Pontaniana, nuova serie, vol. 12 (Napoli, 1963), 225–52Google Scholar.
2 A genealogical tree of the noble family of Totti of Cerreto, written in the seventeenth century, was owned by the parish priest of Cerreto, Don Pietro Pirri, in 1912; see his article ‘Le Notizie e gli scritti di Tommaso Pontano e di Gioviano Pontano Giovane,’ Bollettino della Regia Deputazione di Storia Patria per l'Umbria, vol. XVIII (1912), p. 399Google Scholar, n. 28. I wrote to Padre Pirri at the Jesuit College in Rome in April 1967, and received a courteous reply, although not directly helpful to my purpose. He sent me extracts from a manuscript work by Antonio Valentetti entitled ‘Descrizione di Cerreto,’ of which pp. 74–77 are dedicated to the Totti family. From this it is clear that the family was most numerous, including many notaries, priests, doctors, lawyers and men of learning; but there is no mention of Pompilio, Sebastiano or Lodovico. The Totti coat-of-ariris contained a wild boar standing under a tree with a bird on the top of the tree.
3 Iacobilli, Lodovico, Bibliotheca Vmbriae…volumen primum (Fulginiae, 1658) p. 232Google Scholar. There is also a brief account of him in Nagler, G. K., Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon, Bd. 19 (München, 1849), p. 26Google Scholar: ‘Totti, Pompilio. Kupferstecher und Kunsthändler, war um 1680 (sic for 1630) in Rom thätig. Von ihm sind vielleicht die Blätter in folgendem Werke: Ritratti ed Elogii di Capitani illustri etc. In Roma alle spese di P. Totti Libraro 1635. Christ nennt ihn Toto.’ I have not located the relevant passage in the works of Johann Friedrich Christ.
4 The date on the titlepage is in the form ‘M.DC.XXII.’ The final letter of the date being much larger than the others is generally taken to stand for two rather than one, and thus the date is probably 1623, not 1622. It has, however, been read as 1622 by both the British Museum and by the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. The date of Totti's preface may be 1622/23 rather than 1622 (i.e. old style).
5 For instance, in the same year 1623 Alessandro de'Vecchi in Venice published an edition of Gastore Durante, Il Tesoro della sanità, some copies of which have the additional imprint ‘Si vende in Roma alla Libraria dalla Venetia.’ It seems that de'Vecchi himself was not a printer.
6 The Marchesa Iris Origo mistakenly gives 1614 instead of 1624 as the date of the first edition of this life of Cola di Rienzo in her book Tribune of Rome (London, 1938), p. 255Google Scholar.
7 Michel, S. P. and Michel, P. H., Répertoire des ouvrages imprimés en langue italienne au XVIIe siècle conservés dans les bibliothèques de France, tom. I (Paris, 1967), p. 46Google Scholar, describing the copy in the Bibl. Mazarine.
8 It has been suggested that this artist may have been Luca Ciamberlano (1586–1641), a native of Urbino who worked most of his life in Rome. See Boffito, Giuseppe, Frontespizi incisi nel libro italiano del Seicento (Firenze, 1922), p. 73 and p. 79Google Scholar.
9 Testi, Fulvio, Lettere, a cura di Doglio, M. L., vol. II (Bari, 1967), letter no. 809, p. 282Google Scholar.
10 Testi, , Lettere, vol. II, no. 836, p. 310Google Scholar.
11 I hope shortly to deal with this book in another article, and to demonstrate on typographical grounds who the Roman printer was.
12 Rhodes, D. E., La Stampa a Viterbo (Firenze, 1963), p. 126, no. 310Google Scholar.
13 It is evidently not in Faurax, Abbé Joseph, Bibliographie lorétaine (Paris, 1913Google Scholar).
14 Ottavio Tronsarelli died in 1641 according to the Library of Congress catalogue, but in 1645 according to the Vatican. His regular printer was Francesco Corbelletti, but he had a few books printed by Fei and Mascardi.
15 I have for the most part preserved Totti's spelling of names; hence ‘Christofaro’ rather than ‘Cristoforo.’
16 See Hutton, Edward, Rome (London, Hollis & Carter, 1950), pp. 237–8Google Scholar.
17 Lelio Guidiccione translated Virgil's Aeneid into Italian and had his Rime published at Rome in 1637. There is no mention of Totti in this book, nor in Tronsarelli's Rime of 1627.
18 Hibbard, Howard, ‘The Architecture of the Palazzo Borghese,’ Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 27 (1962), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar and footnote 47, where the author quotes the book as being by Lodovico Totti instead of by Pompilio: it is correctly indexed under Pompilio.
19 Testi, Fulvio, Lettere, vol. III (Bari, 1967), no. 1451, p. 204Google Scholar. This letter was known to Tiraboschi in the eighteenth century, for he refers to it twice: Tiraboschi, G., Vita del Conte D. Fulvio Testi (Modena, 1780), pp. 149–50Google Scholar; Biblioteca Modenese, tom. V (Modena, 1784), pp. 259–60Google Scholar. Tiraboschi also seems to have been aware (ibid., p. 259) that the 1636 edition of Testi's Alcina was printed at Rome and not at Modena.
20 See Autori Italiani del Seicento, no. 2654, for further complications in the bibliographical history of this difficult book.