Trovar Maria nella Selva. Storie di testi e immagini nella Selva di varia lettione del 1616

The 1616 edition of Pedro Mexia’s Selva di varia Lettione is the first illustrated version of a volume that had already undergone almost a century of reprints. For this enterprise, the printers Ambrogio and Bartolomeo Dei reused an enormous quantity of sixteenth-century woodblocks already in their possession, through a sophisticated game of re-semantization of the original subjects. In this way, illustrations from different ensembles were reinterpreted, some from well-known books, such as Marcolini’s Sorti, and others from lost editions, such as the project for an unpublished Vitruvius or many popular cantari. Among the latter, the illustration for a lost impression of the Historia di Maria per Ravenna stands out, a well-known fourteenth-century novel with remarkable editorial success, reused here on the basis of its own extraordinary fame. Behind this unconventional use of images probably hide the beginnings of Johannes Thuilio, a little more than unknown figure, but destined for a career linked to reflection on images.