Epithalamia exoticis linguis reddita
Giambattista Bodoni
(Italian, 1740–1813)
Carlo Castone della Torre di Rezzonico
(Italian, 1742–1796)
Benigno Bossi
(Italian, 1727–1792)
Domenico Cagnoni
(Italian, 18th century)
Giovanni Volpato
(Italian, 1740–1803)
Giuseppe Patrini
(Italian, 1711–1786)
Ludwig Sommerau
(German, 1756–1786)
Simon François Ravenet, the Younger
(French, 1748–after 1814)
Benigno Bossi
(Italian, 1727–1792)
Evangelista Ferrari
(Italian, died in 1779)
Domenico Muzzi
(Italian, 1742–1812)
Giambattista Bodoni
(Italian, 1740–1813)
1775
Place of PublicationParma, Italy
Medium/TechniqueIllustrated book with numerous etchings
DimensionsOverall: 48 x 34.2 x 4.2 cm (18 7/8 x 13 7/16 x 1 5/8 in.)
Credit LineWilliam A. Sargent Fund
Accession number41.48
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This book was a wedding present. It contains poems celebrating the wedding of Marie, sister of France’s King Louis XVI, to Charles, Prince of Piedmont, in all manner of “exotic” languages. There are poems in Arabic and Hebrew and Chinese; and the book even includes languages that neither the authors nor we can read. For example, one page is in Etruscan, a pre-Roman language that even today has yet to yield all its mysteries. But to Bodoni, dedicated above all to the beauty of printed letters, the fact that no one could read Etruscan was no reason to deny the language an elegant font!
Parma: Ex Regio Typographeo, 1775
ProvenancePrince Galitzin; unidentified armorial bookplate with motto "Terram opes patriae sibi nomen"; Russian library stamp; Philip Hofer, Cambridge (1898-1984); Harvard College Library, from whom purchased by MFA, February 13, 1941.