Cavalieri, Giovanni Battista De

CAVALIERI, Giovanni Battista de (ca 1525-ca 1601). OPERA nelaquale vie molti mostri de tutte le parti del mondo antichi et moderni con le dechiarationi a ciascheduno fine al presento anno 1585. Rome: by the author, 1585.
4 o (280 x 211 mm). Engraved title and 18 etched plates. (Some pale marginal soiling.) Contemporary limp vellum (front joint cracked); blue cloth slipcase. Provenance: acquired from McCarron, 1990.
Cavalieri, born at Lagherino and died at Rome, etched and engraved numerous series of prints after great Italian masters in a style that resembles that of Aeneas Vico. The present series copies Hans Burgkmair's woodcuts that would eventually appear in the supplement to Giovanni Botero's Delle relationi universali, Venice, 1617 and which would constitute "the first serious study of native life and dress made for publication in a European travel book" (Walter Oakeschott). Burgkmair's woodcuts very likely also formed part of a larger work by Burgkmair now lost. Both sets of woodcuts clearly were known in the first part of the 16th century, as evidenced by Cavalieri's copies and other books illustrated with cuts influenced by them (including those by Paré and Münster). No edition containing Burgkmair's original blocks is known before their 17th-century use in the supplement to Botero. The fantastical cuts of monsters which Cavalieri has reproduced in etching and engraving include figures