CICERON. Opera omnia. S.l., apud Pedrum Santandreanum, 1577. - Lot 19

CICERON. Opera omnia. S.l., apud Pedrum Santandreanum, 1577. 4 tomes in 2 volumes in-folio, edition with comments and annotations by Denis Lambin. Bound in full contemporary brown morocco, the covers richly decorated, the first cover decorated with daisy semis with scrolls and fleurons, medallions featuring the portrait of Marguerite de Navarre in profile framing a central medallion enhanced with white and blue wax and surrounded by black wax scrolls on an azure background, featuring a radiant sun, shells in the spandrels, framed by gilded fillets, friezes of fleurons, friezes of rinceaux and azure irons on the spandrels, the second plate with similar decoration, with semis of fleurons only, the central medallion framed by fermesses and with the Navarre chain gilded on a red background, spine decorated with 5 nerves, the caissons with semis of fleurons and central fleuron, nerves enhanced, all edges gilded. Ex-libris Josy Mazodier and "ex-musaeo L. Double". LE CICÉRON DE LA REINE MARGOT : Exceptional copy with the emblems of Marguerite de Valois, daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, wife of Henri IV, Queen of France, nicknamed Reine Margot, from her library. Reine Margot was considered by her contemporaries, and later by historians and bibliophiles, to be one of the most literate women of her time, having amassed one of the richest and most prestigious libraries of the period, rivalling those of her brothers or the King. For Quentin-Bauchard, author of Femmes bibliophiles de France, she was "the woman who most brilliantly lived through this strange century, after Diane de Poitiers". As Brantôme points out, "she was very curious to collect all the beautiful new books that were being composed, both in holy and human letters". Her library is relatively well known, thanks in particular to the inventory drawn up after the Queen's death by notaries Pierre Guillard and Raoul Bontemps on Monday March 30, 1615, in the presence of commissioners Rieux, Arnauld, de Marillac and de Flesselles, appraised by Pierre Le Vasseur with the help of bookseller Gilles Robineau, and transcribed by Marie-Noëlle Baudouin-Matuszek in 2007. Our work can be found under the fourth reference of the inventory: "Opera Ciceronea, Lambini, Folio, two volumes, covered in gilt morocco, prisé dix livres t." At the time, the work was considered one of the most valuable in the Library, one of only 6 of the 281 numbers in the inventory to be valued at over 10 livres (along with Du Chesne's Histoire générale d'Angleterre, Escosse et Irlande, 1614, 12 livres ; Androuet du Cerceau's 4 volumes, together 12 livres; Vignier's 3-volume library, together 25 livres; Du Préau's L'estat de l'Eglise, 10 livres; and Plato's Oeuvres published by Estienne in 3 volumes, together 12 livres). In his 2017 census (addendum 2021), Nicolas Ducimetière lists 26 works identified to date as coming from the library of Reine Margot. They all seem to derive from the same type, known as the "iron in the sun", with filleted frames, shells in the spandrels and a central radiating sun, sometimes smiling, sometimes adorned with an eye. However, another type is described by Marie-Noëlle Baudouin Matuszek, "a second type of ornament is the sowing, either of fleur-de-lys, or of the queen's cipher, or of daisies (only one known occurrence, the Recueil des prophéties de Sainte Brigide)". Our copy, with its daisy-sown decoration, is therefore one of only two currently identified among surviving works. The daisy motif is itself extremely rare, but can be found, for example, as a central ornament on the caissons of the copy of Valeriano's Commentaires hiéroglyphiques in the Bibliothèque municipale de Melun. The binding is all the more remarkable in that it combines many of the major decorative features of 16th-century luxury bindings: azure backgrounds, semé, portraits, medallions and wax highlights. At the head of the first volume is a letter from the bookseller François, dated 1862, recording the sale of the work to the famous collector Léopold Double. Both volumes appear in the catalog of the sale of his collection in 1881, at no. 51 in the section devoted to Books, already identified as having belonged to Marguerite de Navarre and described as covered with a "very curious binding". They are also cited by Quentin-Bauchart (n°17 p.151), who correctly identifies the copy as that of Léopold Double, and by Marie-Noëlle Baudouin Matuszek, "elle a Cicéron dans l'édition donnée par Denis Lambin, couverte de maroquin doré", whose e