E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle... Dante Day, 25 March 2020

A CELEBRATION OF DANTE

PART I

On 17 January 2020, the Italian Government approved to make 25 March Dantedì, or National Dante Day, in light of the celebrations honouring the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021. The choice of this date is obviously not arbitrary: 25 March, the day for celebrating the Annunciation, marked the beginning of a new year in medieval Florence, and Dante also declares this day to be the start of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise; the journey takes place during Easter week of the year 1300, and is superbly narrated in the 100 cantos that comprise the Commedia, from the poet’s entrance, in the middle of life, into the selva oscura or dark forest, until his final vision of God, the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Of course, on 17 January, no one could have imagined the way the deadly Covid-19 virus has managed to lockdown the entire world. Major initiatives planned for 25 March have obviously been cancelled, but Dantedì will nevertheless be celebrated in Italy; granted, the celebrations will now be virtual, but at this tragic time, they may also be stronger than ever, through readings, podcasts, and online exhibitions. 

We are pleased to add our voice to this virtual homage to Dante and his timeless Commedia, with which the name of the Florentine poet has forever been irrevocably entwined. According to Jorge Luis Borges, “When writers die, they become books”: this statement is especially true for the ‘crowns’ of world literature: Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Dante.

Copies of Dante’s Inferno circulated even before the poem was entirely finished, and it is enough to leaf through the census by Marcella Roddewig (Dante Alighieri. Die Göttliche Komödie, Stuttgart 1984), or admire the illustrations supplementing the still unsurpassed survey by Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy (Princeton 1969) to realize the work’s enormous manuscript circulation in the first two centuries after Dante’s death: from the fourteenth-century codices belonging to the famous group known as the Dante del Cento, an early large-scale Florentine production uniform in layout, script and style of decoration, to the manuscripts written in mercantesca, owned by merchants and skilled artisans, who often learned to read and write in Italian vernacular using the Commedia, to luxury illuminated manuscripts.

Domenico di Michelino, Dante and his Comedy, 1465. Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore.

Dante’s name takes clear pride of place in the collections of Italian books held by great research libraries across Europe and the United States, many of which offer the possibility of exploring their digital collections, including digitized versions of magnificently illuminated Commedia manuscripts, such as the famous Egerton MS 943, produced in northern Italy in the 1st half of the fourteenth century, and once owned by Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater (1756-1829). See the description here.

After the appearance of the first printed Commedia in the fifteenth century – the editio princeps produced in Foligno by one of Gutenberg’s former associates, Johann Neumeister, and the still rarer Mantuan edition, which was likewise issued in 1472 and competes for priority with the Foligno Commedia – Dante’s great masterpiece was published in countless editions. The poem was read, commented on, re-interpreted, translated, and illustrated over the course of the following centuries, and the influence of its textual imagery has proven an inexhaustible source of inspiration for poets, writers and artists until today.

Manuscripts and early printed editions of the Commedia are seen as ‘jewels in the crown’, and have always been among those works most highly sought after by great book collectors and antiquarian book dealers. The entry of the Foligno Commedia is, for example, recorded in the sale catalogues of legendary eighteenth-century private libraries like that amassed by Louis-Jean Gaignat (1697-1768), which was sold in Paris in 1769 by the bookseller Guillaume François De Bure (1732-1782). In the Catalogue des livres du Cabinet de feu M. Louis-Jean Gaignat, the section devoted to the Poëtes Italiens opens with Dante, specifically the Commedia printed in Foligno in 1472 (lot 1969), described as the “Editio primaria princeps”. This entry is followed by the aforementioned 1472 Mantuan edition, here interestingly designated the “Editio primaria secunda”.

From Catalogue des livres du Cabinet de feu M. Louis-Jean Gaignat, Paris 1769, p. 490.

The copies, both bound – as stated in the relevant short descriptions – in blue morocco, were purchased by another extraordinary figure of eighteenth-century French bibliophily, Louis César de La Baume Le Blanc, duc de La Vallière (1708-1780). The 1783 sale catalogue of his collection contains an impressive series of manuscripts and early printed editions of the Commedia, including the two volumes once owned by Gaignat, still bound in blue morocco (lots 3558 and 3559).

Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu M. le duc de La Vallière. Seconde Partie, Paris 1785.

The Foligno Dante was also a must-have in eighteenth-century England, as its entry in the sale catalogue of the exquisite library assembled by the physician Anthony Askew (1722-1774) attests. The auction of the Bibliotheca Askeviana took place in London in 1775, and the 1472 Commedia, bound in ‘corio turcico’, was sold for the sum of 6 pounds and 10 shillings.

In 1789, another copy of this edition came on the English market, on the occasion of the auction of “the book-treasures of the far-famed Pinelli Collection” (T. F. Dibdin, Bibliomania: Or Book Madness. A Bibliographical Romance, London 1811, p. 541). The superb collection amassed in Venice by bibliophile and printer Maffeo Pinelli (1735-1785) was auctioned by London booksellers James Edward and James Robson, who, on the title-page of the sale catalogue, emphasize the Bibliotheca Pinelliana’s “unparalleled Collection of Greek, Roman, and Italian Authors, from the Origin of Printing”. The Foligno Dante included here (lot 2605) is described as an “Insigne edizione, che si riguarda come la prima […] Esemplare della migliore conservazione, e noblissimamente legato”, i.e., a “Celebrated edition, which is considered to be the first […] Copy in excellent condition, magnificently bound”. The volume reached the remarkable sum of 25 pounds and 14 shillings.

Further, both ‘first editions’ of 1472, the Foligno and the Mantuan ones, were preserved in another magnificent English library, that of George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (1758-1834), one of the greatest collectors of Italian books and, more specifically, of Dante editions of all ages.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, 1786. The Spencer Collection at Althorp, Northamptonshire, UK.

In the catalogue of the incunables preserved in Spencer’s book collection at Althorp in Northamptonshire, his librarian and agent Thomas Frognal Dibdin dedicates six pages to the description of these two typographical monuments (see Bibliotheca Spenceriana; or a Descriptive Catalogue of the Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century, London 1815, vol. 4, nos. 811 and 812). In 1821, a sale of duplicates from his marvelous library was organized in London, which included numerous books from the collection of the Neapolitan nobleman Luigi, 4th Duke of Cassano Serra (1747-1825), which Earl Spencer had almost entirely purchased during his tour in Europe in 1819-20. The sale was organized by the London bookseller Evans, and has represented a veritable, perhaps unique event in the history of the nineteenth-century book collecting, attracting all the great names of international bibliophily and antiquarian dealing, and significantly contributing “to the aggrandizement of the Grenville, Sussex, Heber, and Bodleian Library” (E. Edwards, Libraries and Founders of Libraries, London 1865, p. 417). The catalogue also included a copy of the Foligno Dante – described as a “perfect and sound copy in calf binding” – which was bought for the sum of about 19 pounds by the Bodleian Library (see A Catalogue of Rare and Valuable Duplicates from the Library of the Rt. Hon. Earl Spencer, K. G, London 1821, lot 92). Also on offer was a copy of the Mantuan Dante, an edition “of very uncommon occurrence. This copy is short, but it is sound and desirable and quite perfect”. In this case, the buyer was another celebrated figure of nineteenth-century book collecting, Richard Heber (1774-1833), who paid for this ‘short’ copy the sum of 6 pounds (ibid., lot 93).

Although only a short survey, the names of the outstanding bibliophiles, bibliographers, and booksellers mentioned here suffices to show the wide spread of Dante collecting in early nineteenth-century England; a significant contribution was also made to this landscape by numerous Italian intellectuals residing in Britain, such as Mozart’s librettist, the book dealer Lorenzo da Ponte (1774-1833), who was well acquainted with Earl Spencer, and who published, in London in 1800, a Catalogo dei Libri Italiani offering a dozen editions of the Commedia, including the milestone 1481 edition supplemented with the commentary by Cristoforo Landino: the first Florentine edition of the Commedia, and the first to be illustrated, with engravings after the magnificent drawings by Sandro Botticelli. To say nothing of the role played by the exiled poet and writer Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), the renowned author of the epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, who published the first edition of his commentary to the Commedia in London in 1825 (Discorso sul testo e su opinioni diverse prevalenti intorno alla storia e alla emendazione critica della Commedia di Dante, London, William Pickering, 1825).

In the next few posts, and with a view to the approaching 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021, we will continue this survey, tracing the subsequent story of Dante collecting until the early twentieth century, adding to the itinerary such great names as Horace de Landau, Thomas David Gibson-Carmichael, and the renowned Dante scholar Lord Vernon, one of the leading figures in the Anglo-Florentine community and one of the members of the ‘Dante Club’, a group in the habit of dressing up like Dante in medieval costume. The legacy of great Italian book collecting will also be represented by Giovanni Giacomo Trivulzio, Benedetto Maglione, and Giuseppe Cavalieri, among others. In addition to tracing these histories, we also look forward to describing some of the copies bearing distinguished provenance that have passed through our hands over the years, as well as to presenting more recent discoveries.

In the end, it’s not so much Dante Day as Dante Weeks here at PrPh!

Dante, Commedia, printed in Foligno in 1472.

In the meantime, we invite you to take a journey through Dante’s works, his subsequent critical reputation, and the history of Dante collecting, from the end of the fifteenth to the twentieth century, with two of our catalogues devoted entirely to Dante, which feature many of the names and editions mentioned here.

Until next time, Happy Dantedì to all!

How to cite this information

Margherita Palumbo, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle... Dante Day, 25 March 2020," 25 March 2020, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/dante-day. Accessed [date].

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