Antique Dante Alighieri Cigar Box Label 🚬 Chromolithograph Gold Embossed Tobacciana 1900s

Why Is Dante on a Cigar Box? 🚬 Antique Dante Alighieri Gold Embossed Chromolithograph Cigar Label, 1900s

Size: 8 3/4" x 8 1/4" ~ Unused, never applied to a box.

🚬 The Label

This cigar box inner label is printed DANTE in large gold capitals over a crimson field with gold pin-stripe rules, a round medallion portrait of Dante Alighieri in profile — laurel wreath, red robe — and two small crowned shields, one with a pale gold lily on red, the other with a pale green cross on red. The lily is the Florentine kind, with the little stamens standing up between the petals — Florence kept those stamens for its own city's symbols. The gold is embossed, raised right off the paper, and the back shows the whole design in blind relief, mirrored, with no ink at all.

🏛️ Dante, and the Lily of Florence

Dante was already a taken name in the cigar trade by 1910 — a new registration for it was refused that year because the name was already claimed. The lily shield is close to Florence's own coat of arms as it stood before 1250-51: the city's lily was white on red until the victorious Guelphs flipped the colors to the red-on-white you'd recognize today. So this label carries Florence's older arms, from before the city's own civil war changed them — a nice detail for a Florentine poet's cigar. Dante Alighieri himself was born in Florence in 1265 and banished from it in 1302, and he wrote the Divine Comedy in exile. He died in Ravenna in 1321 and he's still there - Florence built him an empty tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce in 1829, and Ravenna has never handed him back.

🎭 Why a Poet on a Cigar Box

Cigar brands of the period reached for names that said something about the smoker — European, literary, a cut above. A brand carrying Dante's own portrait, laureled like a poet-laureate and flanked by Florentine heraldry, would have needed no translation in the Italian neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, up on Federal Hill in Providence, or in a Massachusetts mill town like Lawrence, where a big share of the mill hands who walked out in the 1912 strike were Italian. Those were the places so many of the 4.2 million Italians who came over between 1880 and 1921 made their homes. It's the Dante people had known for centuries, too — the sharp profile, the laurel, the red robe. Domenico di Michelino painted him in that crimson robe and laurel wreath for Florence Cathedral in 1465, the 200th anniversary of his birth, and Botticelli gave him that same sharp profile and laurel around 1495.

🖨️ How It Was Made

Chromolithographs like this one took a separate stone for every color, each one ground and registered by hand before the sheet went through the press again, and the embossed gold was a separate die-stamping pass after the color work was finished. On labels like this the trade laid that gold on as bronze powder and buffed it up bright on something close to a shoe-shine wheel. Lithography houses of the period kept flat sample books and proof sheets of what came off their presses as a record for salesmen — a good many of those survive today and turn up in the same collecting category as labels like this one. The best cigar label shops of the day were run by German immigrants. After 1870 New York was full of German lithographers turning out cigar art — Schumacher & Ettlinger, F. Heppenheimer & Co., George Schlegel, Witsch & Schmitt — and just seven German-run shops, in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, together with George Harris & Sons in Philadelphia, printed roughly 80 percent of the cigar labels used in this country. Schlegel's, started in 1849, ran for more than a hundred years through four generations of the family, and the firm's archive was saved by the collector John Grossman — it's part of his collection at Winterthur in Delaware now.