Gio: Maria Ciocchi - La Pittura in Parnaso - 1725

Painting in Parnassus.
Work by Gio Maria Ciocchi, academician of design, dedicated to the most illustrious Lord Neri Guadagni, marquis dis. Leonino del Conte, chamberlain to His Highness the Most Serene Electoral Elector Palatine of the Rhine and Grand Constable of the Holy Religion of St. Stephen, Pope and Martyr.
CIOCCHI GIO. MARIA.

Publisher: In the printing house of Michele Nestenus,
In Florence, 1725

First edition

Cm. 25,5, pp. xxiv, 310.
Strictly contemporary full vellum binding, spine with gilt binding and titles. An excellent copy, with incredibly crisp and clean interior pages, margins and authenticity. Very few stains.
Rare original edition of this work considered "one of the most interesting and least known documents of Florentine artistic literature of the time".

Giovanni Maria, descendant of a family of artists active in Florence from the 17th to the early 19th century, was a poet and music lover.
When, towards the end of his life, he could no longer paint due to deteriorating eyesight, he began to write a book, Painting in Parnassus, which was published a few months after his death, in 1725.

The volume, published by the Mchele Nestenus printing house in Florence, bears a dedication to the Marquis Neri Guadagni, and in the preface the author recounts having discarded an initial plan to compile the lives of modern painters, as well as one, suggested by friends, of a treatise on the supposed superiority of ancient Greek painting over modern painting.
Wanting to write about painting in any case, he finally chose to return to the theme of the comparison between painting and sculpture, setting the dialogue in the entirely eighteenth-century fiction of a visit by Painting to Parnassus to plead on its behalf against Sculpture before the tribunal of Apollo.