TO THE MOST BLESSED FATHER

ALEXANDER

THE SEVENTH

SUPREME PONTIFF

A square decorative initial 'O' set within a dense floral and foliate woodcut border.

This Egyptian obelisk, after the passage of so many centuries and ages, has shone forth upon the City and the world with a brilliant omen of full felicity at the very time when you, Alexander VII, Supreme Pontiff, preside over it with supreme power. Since this monument is crowded with subtle sphinxes and replete with more recondite mysteries of doctrine, I have deemed it right to consecrate it to no one better than to YOU, O MOST GLORIOUS Pontiff, oracle of divine and human wisdom; I was impelled to dare this all the more, both by that admirable capacity and opulence of your great mind, through which you excel in unraveling the recesses of abstruse literature, and by the subject matter of the sublime things which the tapering mass contains, [fitting for] the Pontifical