COOK, James - GIANETTI, Michelangiolo.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Elogy of Captain James Cook. First and only edition of "the first of the complete eulogies to Cook" (Smith, p. 228). A fascinating, highly appealing example of Cook's rapid European apotheosis, printed six years after his death and noted as a fine example of 18th-century Italian printing. An uncommon book with only a handful of copies traced in auction records. Gianetti was a dilettante poet and professor of anatomy at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. His rhapsodic account includes "what were fast becoming common features of tributes to Cook, such as his humble beginnings, and his introduction of the fruits of European civilisation - new plants, breeds of cattle, technology and commercial skills - to the peoples of the Pacific" (Williams, p. 71). Kippis, Cook's biographer, noted that "greater honour is paid to [Cook's] name abroad than at home. A remarkable proof of it occurs, in the eulogy of our navigator, by Michael Angelo Gianetti, which was read at the Royal Florentine Academy, on the ninth of June, 1785, and published at Florence, in the same year" (Kippis, p. 505). The dedication is to Sir Horace Mann, British ambassador in Florence. The translation, signed "R. M.", is by English poet Robert Merry, who arrived in Florence in 1784 and entered the city's circle of expatriate English writers and dissident Italians, returning to England in 1787 following an affair with the mistress of the grand duke; it is Merry's extravagant style, which William Gifford late

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