[Columbus, Christopher]:

$85,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

[MANUSCRIPT POEM IN ITALIAN, BEING A LONG BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF COLUMBUS]. From the collection of R. David Parsons. The only known copy of a long biographical account of Columbus, this is the earliest known poetical work in vernacular inspired by the contemporary sources on his life and discoveries. An extraordinary survival, the anonymous epic poem is composed in ottava rima by a skilled versifier and follows the Renaissance model of Boccaccio, Boiardo, Pulci, and Ariosto.The text comprises 712 hendecasyllabic verses arranged in eighty-nine octave stanzas. The first eighteen pages (sixty stanzas, 480 lines) treat the military conflicts in Italy during the French and Spanish conquests and subsequent rivalry of the early 16th century. Most of the events described fall in the period 1500-10. The remaining ten pages (twenty-nine stanzas, 232 lines) are dedicated to Columbus, his birth, youth, and education, his suit to King Ferdinand and patronage by Queen Isabella, his first voyage of discovery to America, his triumphant return, and part of his second voyage. The events are related by an internal narrator, who identifies himself as the Emperor Maximilian I.The primary sources on Columbus are Paolo Giovio's Elogia Virorum Illustrium (1546, containing a literary portrait of the explorer) and his Vita di Consalvo di Cordova (1547). The text contains details which are only recorded by Giovio among all early commentators: for example, the town of Arbizolo (modern-day Abissola) ide

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