Artifacts
9357 Seta, Silk, Soie
Texts by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde S.J., Mario Bussagli. Introduction by Franco Maria Ricci
2001 / 84 PAGES.
Language: italian/english/french
This publication is the new edition of a text about silk from the Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise by the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde published in Paris in 1735, one of the first works that made China known to the West.
Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s text gives us a detailed account of the history and stages of the silkworm breeding process, the product of which is a ‘fabric so admirable as to be considered a divine thing’, as Franco Maria Ricci defines it in the volume’s preface. The publisher’s wish, he continues in the preface, is that the reader will also be fascinated by the ‘fairytale-like description’ of Hu Halde’s text. The volume is enriched with colour plates reproducing the twenty-three miniatures on silkworm breeding found in a hardback album preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. There are also engravings taken from a large panel that Du Halde himself included in his text on silk, because according to the author, ‘one judges better with the eyes than with words’. Finally, Mario Bussagli edits the Notes to the Iconography at the end of the volume.