Rare first edition of this spectacularly illustrated volume dedicated to the art and architecture of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.

The work comes out of the presses of Antonio Zatta (†1797), the most important Venetian publisher of illustrated books of the time, and is adorned from the architectural engravings of Antonio Visentini (1688-1782), an artist who was an apprentice of the painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and who later collaborated with Canaletto, Tiepolo and Mengozzi-Colonna. The volume, with its elegant deluxe printing (see the opening folio of the text with a very large indigo-printed drop cap and a sepia-printed initial) and its close attention to antiquarian issues, has all the hallmarks of a work produced thinking about the wishes of the English "Grand Tourist". 
The 8 large folding plates of the work were published for the first time (without text) by Visentini in 1726, like the famous and rare Iconography of the Ducal Basilica. The original copperplates "came into the possession of the publisher Antonio Zatta around 1759. In 1761 he republished them, adding a meticulous Description ... The result is one of the most elegant books printed in 18th-century Venice century. Magnini engraved a new ornate title page ... with an allegory of Venice and the new title ... The old title page was reused as a frontispiece; instead of the title, it shows San Marco" (Martineau and Robinson, p. 465 ). Magnini (active 1750-1780) also provided an elaborate Rococo border for the full-page dedication portrait of Marco Foscarini (1696-1763), poet, literary historian, procurator of San Marco and Doge of Venice from 31 May 1762 until his death. To all intents and purposes, Zatta's volume on San Marco - which adds much discursive material to Visentini's tables - is perhaps the first separately published work entirely dedicated to the art and architecture of the basilica.Berlin Kat. 2708; Cicognara 3944; Morazzoni 214; Lanckoronska 19; J. Martineau and A. Robinson, eds., The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth-Century, p. 465; Millard, Italian, p. 477.