Beschreibung:

Pietro BEMBO (1470-1547). Ad Herculem Strotium de Virgilii Culice et Terentii fabulis liber (etc). Relié avec - De Aetna ad Angelum Chabrielem liber . PIC DE LA MIRANDOLE (1470-1532). Ad Petrum Bembum de imitatione libellus . Venise: Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio et Frères, 1530. Exemplaire personnel de travail de Pietro Bembo avec ses annotations et rectifications. 4°. Collation: aa-cc 8 . 24 leaves. Italic type. One 3-line initial space and one 4-line initial space with guide letters. (Paper flaw to outer margin of bb5.) Early 18th-century English red morocco gilt over pasteboard, plain and ornamental rules, and gilt dentelle border on sides, gilt fleuron tools in each corner, gilt spine, all edges gilt (joints and headcap rubbed). PROVENANCE: 1. Pietro Bembo: extensive manuscript annotations and corrections in his hand (cropped). 2. Thomas Herbert, eighth Earl of Pembroke (1656-1733): binding, shelfmark, pencilled instructions to binder on first leaf, annotation in English on the flyleaf: 'This was Bembo's Booke in which he has writt many Amplifications'. 3. Giuseppe Martini bookplate and pencilled collation note on flyleaf (sale, Part I, Lucerne: Hoepli, 27 August 1934, lot 21). CONTENTS: BEMBO'S OWN COPY OF FOUR OF HIS WORKS, WITH EXTENSIVE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT REVISIONS IN HIS HAND. Bembo is known to have worked and reworked his writings. He held texts for a long time before publishing them, and then continued to make revisions with a view to future editions. This volume contains changes made over a period of time, but never published, for three of the works printed in these editions of 1530. Though printed with discrete series of signatures and with separate colophons and privilege statements, the four works found in this volume seem nevertheless to have been produced as a set by the same publisher in a uniform format. They are frequently found bound together, as here in the author's copy. The works included reflect various aspects of Bembo's humanistic interests and activities over a large part of his career. De Aetna , first published by Aldus Manutius in 1495, commemorates his youthful ascent of Mt Etna during the two-year period (1492-94) he spent in Sicily studying Greek with Constantine Lascaris. His philological dialogue on the poem Culex attributed to Vergil and on works of Terence, in which he analyzed textual errors introduced over time into the manuscript tradition, was begun as early as 1503 and revised at intervals until it was published in this first edition of 1530. The life of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (d. 1508) and his wife, the cultivated Elisabeth Gonzaga, composed in 1509-10, paid tribute to the deceased duke and to the Renaissance court of Urbino, whose hospitality Bembo had enjoyed for several years; it too was first printed in this 1530 edition. De imitatione takes the form of a letter written on 1 January 1513 in response to one of 19 September 1512 from Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola, nephew of the philosopher, which is also published here. In this exchange, Bembo replied to Pico's arguments for a generalized study and emulation of Antiquity by advocating the careful study of Cicero and Virgil and the exclusive imitation of their style. Bembo's strict Ciceronianism, which he was to put into practice during his later career as papal secretary, was to exercise a permanent influence on humanistic education and the study of Latin. These two letters, together with Pico's further response, were published by Pico in Rome, probably in 1514, and that edition was reprinted in Basel in 1518. The present edition of 1530 was, however, the first printed with Bembo's approval and under his supervision. In the years after 1530 Bembo continued to work on his Latin prose works, devoting the winter of 1543-44 in particular, when he was resident in Gubbio, to preparations for a posthumous edition of his writings. The extensive revisions entered into the present volume were clearly made