Stirling-Maxwell, Sir William (publisher) The Entry of the Emperor Charles V into the City of On the Fifth of November MDXXIX. Reproduced from a Series of Engravings on Wood printed at Venice in MDXXX. Florence, London & Edinburgh: privately printed for Sir William Stirling Maxwell, 1875. Large folio, decorative half-title and title-page printed in red and black, 16 double-page plates, original quarter morocco, yellow paper boards with bevelled edge, binding rubbed and marked, spotting to half-title and final plate

Note: The great Renaissance figure of Charles the Vth was one of Stirling-Maxwell's heroes (ODBN). The individual woodcuts show a continuous parade of nobility, standard-bearers and heralds, musicians, knights in armour on horseback, arquebusiers, halberdiers, pikemen, and riders drawing artillery, moving from right to left and were originally intended to be joined together laterally to form a frieze nearly nine metres long. In the preface Stirling-Maxwell notes that the bad printing of the originals (a copy in Florence) had been amended during the photo-lithographic process and numbers added to the prints for clarity. One of Stirling-Maxwell's 'pioneering books of facsimile prints using the new photolithographic methods' (ODNB), of which 100 copies were printed. Stirling-Maxwell had seen only four copies of the original, and used the Uffizi copy as the basis of his edition. Provenance: 1) Christie’s, The Property of Archibald Stirling of Keir, 22-24 May 1995, lot 712. 2) The Late Lord David Douglas-Hamilton (1952-2020).