PARUTA, Paolo

by Paolo Paruta

£18,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

A magnificent copy, superbly bound in fine contemporary red morocco for presentation to Pope Clement VIII, with his arms finely painted on the covers, of the first edition of Paruta s most celebrated work on Politics. The work was brought to press by the author s son, Giovanni, shortly after Paulo s death in 1598. It gives an excellent overview of the political theories of a Venetian, anti-Machiavellian statesman, and exerted a profound, though not always recognised, influence on the political science of the seventeenth century: Paolo Peruta (1540-1598), entered the service of the Serenissima whilst still very young, was a diplomat and senator, governor of Brescia and finally Proveditor of St. Mark s (in 1596). Paruta was also an important Venetian historian and political theorist. Born in Venice of a noble family from Lucca, Paruta studied in Padua before returning to Venice in 1561, where he held many important diplomatic and political positions for the Republic, including the post of city historian after the death of Pietro Bembo in 1579. Paruta continued this ongoing civic project but wrote his own contribution to the history in Italian rather thatn Latin. His Istorie veneziane (1605, the History of Venice) treats the events that occurred between 1513 and 1552 in twelve books. It received an English translation in 1658 by Henry Carey, Earl of Monmouth, an important English interpreter of the works of Paruta, Campanella, and Boccalini It is Paruta s political treatises tha

• Binding: Hardcover

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