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Books, Autographs & Prints

Friday 15 December 2023, 11:00 AM • Rome

12

Dante Alighieri

(Firenze 1265 - Ravenna 1321)

Dante's songs. Madrigals of the saying. Madrigals by M. Cino & di m. Girardo Nouello, 1518

Estimate

€ 3.000 - 5.000

Sold

€ 3.870

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Milan, for Augustino da Vimercato at instantia de m. I. Iaco. and brothers of Legnano, 1518 to 2nd September. In 8th. Elegant typographical brand on the title page depicting Christ and the Samaritan woman, late 19th century amateur binding in long-grain green morocco, gilded frames on the plates, friezes on the spine.  

Specialist Notes

In the first two centuries of manuscript circulation, Dante's lyrical production took the form of a varied, and often indistinct, set of extravagant texts, the Vita nuova and/or its rhymes, the series of songs (with various more or less stable appendices) and , in some cases, also of the Convivio. This fluidity of the corpus also passes into the printed tradition, although the diffusion that the medium allows and the concurrent scarcity of editions imply the imposition of a canon. The princeps of Dante's songs is found as an appendix at the end of an edition of the Commedia with commentary by Landino (Venice, 1491), and therefore does not constitute a corpus of Rhymes in its own right, for which we must wait until 1518, when, again in Venice, Guglielmo da Fontaneto printed a collection of songs and various compositions by Dante, accompanied by texts by Cino and a da Polenta (the title speaks of songs and madrigals, and the attributions, as one might expect, are not are completely correct). This edition will be reprinted a few months later in Milan by Agostino da Vimercate (subsidized by the da Legnano brothers) and is the first to propose Dante as a lyric poet independently of the Comedy. (How to update a classic: the forms of 'Dante's songbook' between the 16th and 19th centuries by Laura Banella, in «Ecdotic Practices of Literary Modernity» 6 (2021), p.10). Kristeller126; Brunet 515; Sander 2336; Mambelli 993.