Le terze rime.

£20,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The first Aldine edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the first edition of Dante in a portable format; this is the second issue which has the Aldine anchor device at the end, it did not appear in the first. “Aldus’ edition is a landmark, given its sophisticated design, Bembo’s embrace of Trecento Tuscan forms (which he had studied closely), the philological work undertaken in presenting the text and the sense of value bestowed upon Dante by the fact that he is now presented in the octavo format that had previously been reserved only for Latin and Greek authors …” (Gilson, Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy [Cambridge University Press, 2018], p. 33). “Dante’s text was edited by Pietro Bembo from an authoritative fourteenth-century manuscript in his father’s library (now Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 3199), identifiable with a codex sent by Giovanni Boccaccio as a gift to Francesco Petrarca in about 1351-53. Pietro’s autograph manuscript of the edited text, which he passed on to Aldus for printing, also survives (Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 3197). … It was the first edition of the poem after 1500 and its text was copied by the majority of subsequent sixteenth-century editors” (Cambridge University Library online exhibition: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/manutius ). It was Bembo who also supplied title, Le terze rime , which was not retained in subsequent editions. This is one of the earliest Aldines to be printed entirely in italics, the first being the Petrarch which had appea

• Binding: Hardcover

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