Dissertatio de Larvis Scenicis et Figuris Comicis Antiquorum Romanorum Facsimile Edition

Seven years after the death of Francesco de’ Ficoroni, the Roman antiquarian whose excavations along the Via Labicana and in the Alban hills had made him one of the best-known guides to the city’s buried past, his study of the masks of the ancient stage appeared in Latin as Dissertatio de larvis scenicis et figuris comicis antiquorum Romanorum. Published in Rome in 1754 at the expense of Venanzio Monaldini and printed by Angelo Rotili, it is the second, enlarged edition of the translation. The copy described here is held in a private collection.

An Antiquarian’s Rome, Translated for Europe

Ficoroni had first issued the work in Italian in 1736, drawing on terracottas, lamps, gems, and bronzes that had passed through his own hands. The Latin version, attributed to the Jesuit Contuccio Contucci, carried it beyond Italy to the learned readership of the Republic of Letters. This edition adds a chapter and a final plate to the original.

Eighty-Five Copperplates and a Title Page in Red and Black

The quarto volume opens with a title page printed in red and black, set off by an engraved vignette, a headpiece, and an initial; woodcut ornaments punctuate the text. One hundred fifteen numbered pages of Latin are followed by an index, and the eighty-five numbered plates are gathered at the end, one of them folding. Most of the plates are unsigned; a minority bear the names of Silvestro Pomarede, Francesco Mazzoni, and B. de Petris.

Masks Between Stage, Ritual, and Tomb

The plates assemble grimacing comic faces, tragic countenances, and figures from the Roman stage, and the text follows them past the theater into funerary sculpture and religious ritual, where the mask stood for fate and for the face no longer present.

Compiled from excavated fragments rather than from texts alone, the book belongs to a moment when archaeology was becoming a way of reading antiquity.