BOCCACCIO, Giovanni
£9,500 · Offered by Sokol Books
The exquisite gilt binding can be attributed to the Fugger binder (also Venetian Apple binder ). The tooling reprises very closely the fleurons, lotus and apple tools in de Marinis II, 1707 ter. and 2165, and, especially, the cornerpieces on the centre panel and the blind tooling on the spine in Davis III, 296. Handsomely bound copy of the first edition in Italian of this important work by Boccaccio. One of the Three Crowns of Italian literature, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) was the son of a Florentine merchant who found his poetic vocation during his stay as a canon law student in Naples. His Il Filostrato , Teseida and Decameron had a fundamental influence on European authors, including Chaucer. After becoming acquainted with Petrarch and other humanists in the 1350s, he mostly wrote in Latin. De mulieribus claris , which took 15 years to complete from 1361 to 1375, was not translated into Italian until 1545. The Libro is a gallery of the biographies of 106 women mythological, historical and contemporary presented as exempla of virtuous or wicked behaviour, following the genre of de viris illustribus . The translator, Giuseppe Betussi, a renowned C16 writer and supporter of Italian as a literary language, included in the edition a biography of Boccaccio and additional lives of his own composition. Among Boccaccio s mythological women were the berated Helen, wife of King Menelaus, whose kidnapping by Paris started the Trojan war, and Medusa Gorgone, wearing hair in the form
- Binding: Hardcover
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