The monumental first Florentine edition of the Comedy, a stunning copy with wide margins and an illustrious provenance. This edition was strongly desired by Lorenzo the Magnificent to celebrate his power, not only cultural, in fifteenth-century Italy. Cristoforo Landino's commentary appears here for the first time and will only be supplanted in the nineteenth century by Carducci's paraphrase. The 1481 edition represents the first serious attempt to provide a comprehensive and comprehensive commentary on Dante's text. Born under the aegis of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the printing enterprise was superbly executed, for an edition intended to be Lorenzo and Florence's "political" homage to their great literary tradition. The print run of the work must have reached 1,200 copies, according to a letter from Landino to Bembo in 1483 where this number is indicated. Extant copies contain varying numbers of engravings, averaging 2-3; copies containing a greater number are very rare. BMC VI 628; Goff D 29; GW 7966; Hain *5946; IGI 360; Sander 2311.
PROVENANCE: Girolamo d'Adda (1815-1881), a Milanese nobleman, was a refined bibliophile and collector of illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, and rare first editions. He founded a valuable private library and published studies on Christopher Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci, and ancient Italian libraries, distinguishing himself for his philological and art-historical rigor. His research and facsimile editions contributed to the valorization of the book as an art object. A member of the Istituto Lombardo and of European academies, he embodied the 19th-century ideal of the collector-scholar. Part of his collection later passed to international collections.