[Blue paper] Calderia, Giovanni (1395-1474). Concordantiae Poetarum Philosophorum & Theologorum... Venice, Giuseppe Comino da Trino, 1547.
[Blue paper] Calderia, Giovanni (1395-1474). Concordantiae Poetarum Philosophorum & Theologorum... Venice, Giuseppe Comino da Trino, 1547.
Calderia, Giovanni (1395-1474).
Concordantiae Poetarum Philosophorum & Theologorum... opus vere aureum, quod nunc primum in lucem prodijt ex antiquo exemplari Authoris....
Venice, Giuseppe Comino da Trino, 1547.
Printed on blue paper
Calderia, Giovanni (1395-1474).
Concordantiae Poetarum Philosophorum & Theologorum... opus vere aureum, quod nunc primum in lucem prodijt ex antiquo exemplari Authoris.... Venice, Giuseppe Comino da Trino, 1547.
8° (150x93 mm). Printed on blue PaPer. Collation: *4, A-Z4, AA-YY4. [4], 179, [1] leaves. Roman and italic type. Woodcut printer’s device on the title-page. Numerous woodcut animated initials. Early twentieth-century mottled calf, over pasteboards. Covers within two floral borders. Smooth spine divided into compartments with gilt fillet, gilt title on blue lettering- piece, imprint lettered in gilt. Pastedowns and flyleaves in blue paper. A good copy, the first leaves slightly spotted, last leaves somewhat browned. On the recto of the front flyleaf the pencilled note ‘Papier bleu rare’.
Provenance: Count Raoul Chandon de Briailles (1850-1908; ex-libris on the recto of the first flyleaf).
Rare first edition – printed on blue paper – of this treatise by the Venetian physician Giovanni Calderia, possibly composed between 1447 and 1455, and posthumously edited by Michelangelo Biondo, author of Della nobilissima pittura. The edition is dedicated by Biondo to Francesco Donà.
Calderia wrote the Concordantiae Poetarum Philosophorum et Theologorum for his beloved daughter Cateruzza, in an effort to temper her excited religiousness: in 1451, Guarino Veronese’s son had asked for Cateruzza’s hand in marriage but the pious sentiment of the girl, supported by her mother, caused the negotiations to fail. The Concordantiae is the only work by Calderia to be printed, and it guaranteed its author a certain level of reputation as a Platonic philosopher in subsequent centuries, revealing as it does his interest in both moral philosophy and classical poetry.
The copy offered here was once owned by one of the greatest collectors of blue-paper books: Raoul Chandon de Briailles, the universally renown wine merchant and founder of the Chandon de Briailles mark of champagne. Chandon de Briailles may have purchased it from the rich collection of the Venetian cavaliere Andrea Tessier (d. 1896), which was sold in Munich in 1900 by the bookseller Jacques Rosenthal and which included a copy “tiré sur papier bleu” (Bibliothek Tessier. Katalog eins grossen Theils der Bibliotheken des verstorbenen Chevalier Andrea Tessier und des Marchese de***, lot 519, in the section “Particularités. Imprimées sur vélin, sur papier bleu. Elzevier non rognés. Minuscules etc”).
Brunet i, 1470; M. L. King, “Personal, Domestic, and Republican Values in the Moral Philosophy of Giovanni Calderia”, Renaissance Quarterly, 28 (1975), pp. 535-574.
