LA GRANDE COLLANA: THE ARTIST’S BOOK IN ITS ABSOLUTE BEAUTY
It all began in Piazza Carlo Felice, 19 in Turin, at the historicbookstore “Dante Alighieri” owned by Giovanni Battista Fògola - an established meeting place for writers, artists and intellectuals - when in 1961, his younger son Mario founded the “Dantesque Gallery” (Galleria Dantesca) on the upper floor, home to exhibitions, meetings and debates. Shortly thereafter, a publishing house emerged, whose activity was primarily linked to La Grande Collana whose purpose was to present works of both ancient and modern international literature illustrated not by trivial reproductions but by engravings or etchings of contemporary artists.
The work of the artist was to be inspired by the texts chosen by literary critic Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti and literary historian Folco Portinari, both managers of the Grande Collana. The artisan, hand-crafted volumes were pressed and printed on precious “tino” paper by the Magnani Manifacture from Pescia, with the publisher’s logo in watermark, numbered and signed by the artists. Each edition was limited to a number of machine-marked copies in Arabic numerals and without illustrations, alongside 75 copies numbered from I to LXXV, dedicated to subscribers, which included a variable number of illustrations and a birchwood bookmark printed on both sides. The absolute aesthetic beauty of the figurative apparatus had to correspond to the volume’s philological precision. Marziano Bernardi, in an article published in La Stampa in December 1965, spoke correctly of a “culture and exquisite typographical art in a Turin book series for bibliophiles”.
The department of Rare Books and Autographs is particularly pleased to present an almost complete version of La Grande Collana for sale at our next auction on 13 December (lots 159-200) , with its precious volumes printed and marked ad personam with the letter “H”, which were reserved for the Director of the Collana, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti. Squarotti was also the author of several volumes of literary criticism – in part for the Collana itself – and Scientific Director of the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Dictionary of the Italian Language) published by Utet. The second volume of the book series, Honoré de Balzac’s Les Paysans, published in 1965 by Franco Simone with the delightful etchings of French artist Léopold Survage, founder of the cubist “Section d’Or” with Braque and Fernand Léger, is particularly important. Among the illustrations are those of Giacomo Manzù for The Death of the Seasons by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1967), those of the expressionist Ernst Neizvestnyi for Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1967), Umberto Mastroianni for the Life of Alfieri (1968), those by Mario Avati (one of the world’s leading interpreters of the mezzotint) for Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1973), Aldo Salvadori for Vers et Prose by Stéphane Mallarmé (1979), and Ugo Nespolo for Gozzano’s La via del rifugio ( 2005). A mong the notable textual collaborations is that with Mario Praz, who prefacedand translated John Donne’s Selected Poems ( 1976) and Ben Johnson’s Volpone (1970) – the latter accompanied by refined and delicate etchings by Mario Calandri.
Another peculiarity of Fògola’s editions lies in the fact that the illustrations were not usually printed on the front of a single sheet of paper inserted between the pages of the text, but on the inside of a sheet which was folded over several times. This artistic curatorship makes the illustration almost independent from the book and emphasizes its illustrative and figurative importance.
The volumes produced by Mario Fògola for La Grande Collana are considered to be among the most notable and important books by Italian artists of the Twentieth Century.
by ANNETTE POZZO
BROWSE THE CATALOGUE
The work of the artist was to be inspired by the texts chosen by literary critic Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti and literary historian Folco Portinari, both managers of the Grande Collana. The artisan, hand-crafted volumes were pressed and printed on precious “tino” paper by the Magnani Manifacture from Pescia, with the publisher’s logo in watermark, numbered and signed by the artists. Each edition was limited to a number of machine-marked copies in Arabic numerals and without illustrations, alongside 75 copies numbered from I to LXXV, dedicated to subscribers, which included a variable number of illustrations and a birchwood bookmark printed on both sides. The absolute aesthetic beauty of the figurative apparatus had to correspond to the volume’s philological precision. Marziano Bernardi, in an article published in La Stampa in December 1965, spoke correctly of a “culture and exquisite typographical art in a Turin book series for bibliophiles”.
The department of Rare Books and Autographs is particularly pleased to present an almost complete version of La Grande Collana for sale at our next auction on 13 December (lots 159-200) , with its precious volumes printed and marked ad personam with the letter “H”, which were reserved for the Director of the Collana, Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti. Squarotti was also the author of several volumes of literary criticism – in part for the Collana itself – and Scientific Director of the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (Dictionary of the Italian Language) published by Utet. The second volume of the book series, Honoré de Balzac’s Les Paysans, published in 1965 by Franco Simone with the delightful etchings of French artist Léopold Survage, founder of the cubist “Section d’Or” with Braque and Fernand Léger, is particularly important. Among the illustrations are those of Giacomo Manzù for The Death of the Seasons by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1967), those of the expressionist Ernst Neizvestnyi for Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1967), Umberto Mastroianni for the Life of Alfieri (1968), those by Mario Avati (one of the world’s leading interpreters of the mezzotint) for Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1973), Aldo Salvadori for Vers et Prose by Stéphane Mallarmé (1979), and Ugo Nespolo for Gozzano’s La via del rifugio ( 2005). A mong the notable textual collaborations is that with Mario Praz, who prefacedand translated John Donne’s Selected Poems ( 1976) and Ben Johnson’s Volpone (1970) – the latter accompanied by refined and delicate etchings by Mario Calandri.
Another peculiarity of Fògola’s editions lies in the fact that the illustrations were not usually printed on the front of a single sheet of paper inserted between the pages of the text, but on the inside of a sheet which was folded over several times. This artistic curatorship makes the illustration almost independent from the book and emphasizes its illustrative and figurative importance.
The volumes produced by Mario Fògola for La Grande Collana are considered to be among the most notable and important books by Italian artists of the Twentieth Century.
by ANNETTE POZZO
BROWSE THE CATALOGUE