Discovery is the best part of working in a special collections, and the staff at the Library Company often come across items in our collections that we didn’t know we had before, or at least we didn’t know we could look for. The images in this post come from an elephant folio of chomolithographs that illustrate all the beautiful stone surfaces and mosaics of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice (1880s), Italy. Most of the prints show immense detail of the building, but there were a few that took our breathe away with their simplicity. We believe all of the prints could be joined together to create a whole image of the basilica, but these simple vignettes with their “happy clouds” stand alone.
La basilica di San Marco in Venezia. Venice : Ongania, 1881-1887. 12 v. ; cm. (fol.)











