"Halfway between the age of Vittorino da Feltre and that of the Marchioness Isabella and Castiglione, the Mantuan printing of Dante, which in the same year was accompanied by one of the very few printings of the Decameron, represents well the decisive turning point by which in Mantua, as in other courts in that period of time, humanistic culture came to terms with the fourteenth-century tradition and began to produce a new court literature in the new language." (C. Dionisotti, Dante nel Quattrocento , p. 367)
The usual brilliant Dionisotti is right on target when he intuits that the Mantuan edition of Dante's Divine Comedy is crucial for understanding the shift in humanist culture around the 1470s, the shift that ushered in the vernacular and a new era of courtly influence. The 1472 Mantuan edition of the Divine Comedy occupies a place of absolute importance in the history of Dante's text, not only because it belongs to the group of the very first printings of the work, but above all because it represents the first attempt at a conscious philological intervention on the poem in the typographical age . It constitutes the transition point between the fourteenth-century manuscript tradition and the new civilization of the printed book. In 1472 the Comedy was printed for the first time in three different cities: - Foligno (11 April 1472), edition commonly considered the princeps because it is dated; - Mantua (1472, without day and month); - Venice [or Jesi] (July 18, 1472), for Federico de' Conti.
Mantuan printing was born in the court of the Gonzaga family, one of the most important humanist centers in northern Italy. The typographers were two Germans, Georgius de Augusta and Paulus de Butzbach, active in the very early years of Mantuan printing. The enterprise was carried out under the supervision of the humanist Colombino Veronese (Columbinus Veronensis), a key figure in the quality of the text.
From a philological point of view, the 1472 Mantovana is probably the most important of the three Dante editions published that year . Modern studies agree that Colombino used as a basic manuscript a copy very close to the famous " Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3199" or even the Vaticanus Latinus 3199 itself. This codex is today considered one of the most authoritative representatives of the ancient tradition of the Divine Comedy. The most significant aspect of the Mantua edition is Colombino Veronese's involvement. He did not merely finance or promote the undertaking, but acted as a true editor of the text. The printing was preceded by a dedication in tercets addressed to Filippo Nuvoloni, in which Colombino expressed his pride in having Dante printed to make it accessible to a wider audience. This element is crucial because it demonstrates a humanistic awareness of the value of the text and the need to transmit it in an accurate form. But Colombino did not limit himself to copying a single manuscript: he carried out a veritable collation with other codices, likely available in the Gonzaga library . This produced a text that is generally more accurate than the ones in Foligno and Venice.

The Divine Comedy, printed in Mantua in 1472 by Georgius de Augusta and Paulus de Butzbach, under the direction of Colombino Veronese, is one of the monuments of Italian incunabula . If the Foligno edition represents Dante's typographical birth, the Mantuan edition represents the birth of Dante philology in print: a text carefully constructed from manuscripts, elegant in material, historically linked to Gonzaga humanism, and crucial to the poem's transmission in subsequent centuries.

There are 16 copies registered in the world by ISTC, actually 15 since the copy in the Casa di Dante in Rome is was sold a few years ago. Of these 15, only 5 are found in public libraries in Italy (Milan, Naples, Padua, Udine and Verona).

Goff D23; H 5939; Pell 4108; CIBN D-9; IGI 353; Oates 2582; Pr 6882; BMC VII 928; GW 7959; Fac: (ed. L. Pescasio) Mantua, 1972. ISTC: id00023000