Due orazioni in lingua toscana. Accusa contra Leon secretario, di secreti rilevati. Difesa. Parma: S. Viotto, 1 January 1547. (With:) Oratione de la pace. Rome: A. Blado, March 1534.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Rare first edition dedicated to Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, collector of Apollo and Pegasus bindings. The Due orazioni are the second publication of Tolomei in 1547. Written in 1544 while Tolomei was on a visit to Capodimonte, the dedication dated 20 Rome 1544, is to Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, and in it refers to the two speeches as ‘scherzi’: ‘if they please you as much as they pleased those who heard them, to hear it will make me doubly delighted; if they don’t please you, please pretend that they do’. The two elements, the accusation and the defence, are cast in Ciceronian form, with breaks for the reading of witness statements etc. ‘Leon the secretary’ who stands accused is perhaps a fictitious figure. Giovanni Battista Grimaldi (1524- c. 1612) is, of course, the collector for whom were made the Apollo and Pegasus bindings, so long described as ‘Canevari’ bindings until the true identity of the collector was brilliantly discovered by Dr. Anthony Hobson ( Apollo and Pegasus An enquiry into the formation and dispersal of a Renaissance library (1975) esp. pp. 107-115. The book was printed at Parma by Sette Viotto at the instigation of the editor of Tolomei’s letters , Fabio Benvoglienti, and is set in an Arrighiesque italic. On the verso of the last leaf is a strange alphabetic rebus ’ the printer’s trap’. ‘According to what Tolomei told Grimaldi in a letter of 12 May 1547 (printed Hobson p. 203) this ‘quadrangolo’ puzzled him, and was the printer’s idea ‘di capo suo’ ‘to c

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