Art & Architecture Collections

Cicognara Library

Biblioteca Cicognara.  Cicognara Library: Literary Sources in the History of Art and Kindred Subjects.  Urbana, Ill.: Leopoldo Cicognara Program, University of Illinois Library; [Vatican City]: Vatican Library, 1989-.

Art Main Reading Room, Microfiche 1692.

Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834) was a notable early art historian whose personal library contained approximately five thousand of the most prominent Western art and architecture books published from the 16^th through early 19^th centuries.  Although the library is housed in the Vatican in Rome, researchers at Stanford have access to the full texts of each volume of the library via microform.  These early, rare works, published in Italian, Latin, English, and French, include biographies of artists and poets, iconographical studies, studies on perspective, treatises on sculpture, manuals on how to draw, paint, and build architectural structures, books about museum collections, travel guides, works on funerary rites and hieroglyphics, architectural dictionaries, studies on costumes, emblems, numismatics, Greek and Roman antiquities, and more. 

A two volume, printed guide to the Cicognari collection, entitled Catalogo ragionato dei libri d'arte e d'antichità posseduti dal conte Cicognara (Cosenza, Editrice Casa del Libro, 1960) can be found in Art Library Reference Z5939 .C568 1821A.  The two volumes are a reprint of the 1821 edition of the catalog.

The microforms are organized according to the numerical sequence found in the catalog, with each item in the library classified by subject and then organized alphabetically by author or title within each subject.   

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