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Books, Autographs & Prints / Part II

Wednesday 31 March 2021, 03:00 PM • Rome

436

Ricci, Franco Maria / Serafini, Luigi

Codex Seraphinianus, 1981

Estimate

€ 500 - 800

Sold

€ 1.088

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Milan, Franco Maria Ricci, 1981. In 2nd. 2 vols. With numerous illustrations by Luigi Serafini, small imperfection at the outer edge of the guard paper, editorial binding in black silk with title and friezes imprinted in gold, illustration on paper applied to the front plates, each volume contained in a black silk case. Numbered and signed by the author.

Specialist Notes

First edition, printed in a limited edition of 4000 copies. Our copy, signed by the artist, is number 1268. Considered one of the strangest volumes in the world, the Codex Seraphinianus is a surreal, visionary, metaphysical work in which Serafini is the encyclopedist of a non-existent world in which the exploration of one's own fantasy becomes a sort of self-analytic path. Giving equal importance to the image and the word, it accompanies an asemic writing with fantastic images, leaving the reader the pleasure of interpreting and filling with meanings what he observes. The language, although imaginary, appears surprisingly familiar to us, so much so that we believe that we are actually reading; the images, even though they belong to another world because of their strangeness, maintain common elements with ours. Immediately after publication, the work captured the attention of authoritative intellectuals. Italo Calvino wrote about Serafini's fantastic world: "where the anatomist and the mechanic exchange their morphologies ... where the vegetable marries the commodity, the zoological with the mineral ... so the cement and the geological, the heraldic and the technological, the wild and the metropolitan, the written and the living ".