The monumental first Florentine edition of the Comedy in a stunning copy with wide margins and illustrious provenance. The edition 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 be supplanted only in the nineteenth century by Carducci's paraphrase. The 1481 edition represents the first complete attempt to provide an organic and exhaustive commentary on Dante's text. Born under the aegis of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the typographical enterprise was conducted superbly, for an edition that wanted to present itself as the "political" homage of Lorenzo and Florence to their great literary tradition. The print run of the work must have reached 1200 copies, according to a letter from Landino to Bembo in 1483 where this figure is indicated. There are copies known with a variable number of engravings, on average between 2-3, copies containing a higher number are very rare.
BMC VI 628; Goff D 29; GW 7966; Hain *5946; IGI 360; Sander 2311.