Cimelio tipografico pittorico offerto agli Augustissimi Genitori del Re di Roma da Giambattista Bodoni

Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi (1754-1827)
Parma, Bodoni, 1811, Letterpress. Vellum, etching heightened with watercolour

The birth of Napoleon and Marie Louise's son gave Bodoni the opportunity to produce one of his last masterpieces. The work is dedicated with two sonnets to the venerable parents. The volume includes the text and plates from the 1795 Scherzi Poetici e Pittorici, whose frontispice is used. The facing page of each untitled composition by Giovanni Gherardo de Rossi shows the corresponding allegorical copperplate engraving by Francesco Rosaspina, framed in black. Given the varying length of the texts, the shortest containing four verses and the longest one hundred and four, Bodoni changed the typeface of each component in proportion to its size. At the foot of each printed page is the name of the typeface used and the name of the city composed in the same typeface as in the 1818 Manual, albeit with some variation.