Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321). La Diuina Comedia di Dante... Venice, Niccolò Misserini, 1629.
Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321). La Diuina Comedia di Dante... Venice, Niccolò Misserini, 1629.
Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321).
La Diuina Comedia di Dante, Con gli Argomenti, & Allegorie per ogni Canto. E due Indici, uno di tutti i vocaboli più importanti usati dal Poeta... E l’altro delle cose più notabili.
Venice, Niccolò Misserini, 1629.
The last seventeenth-century Commedia
Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321).
La Diuina Comedia di Dante, Con gli Argomenti, & Allegorie per ogni Canto. E due Indici, uno di tutti i vocaboli più importanti usati dal Poeta... E l’altro delle cose più notabili. Venice, Niccolò Misserini, 1629.
24° (95x50 mm). Collation: A-X12, Y6, *12. [6], 510, [24] pages; numerous leaves misbound, but complete. Roman and italic type. Title-page framed within a woodcut border containing Dante's portrait in the upper panel and the printer's device in the lower one. Fine contemporary binding à la Du Seuil, red morocco tooled in gold over pasteboards. Covers framed by two concentric borders delimited by fillets à l'ancienne, the internal border decorated at its corners with floral tools. Spine with four raised bands, tooled in gilt; title lettered in gold in the second compartment. Gilt edges. A good copy, repairs at joints and foot of spine.
Third and last edition of the Commedia published in the seventeenth century. The volume is printed in the innovative and compact 'long 24mo' format invented by Alessandro Paganini.
From a textual point of view the edition follows the Commedia of 1613, which had been published by the Vicenza printer Francesco Leni under the title of La Visione. Dante's poem is therefore presented without any commentary or encomiastic texts or woodcuts, apart from the arguments and allegories by Lodovico Dolce and the Tavola de vocaboli più oscuri usati da Dante, taken from the Commedia published in 1554-1555 by Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari.
However, rather than use the 1613 title of La Visione – which Donato Pasquardi adopted for the second seventeenth-century edition, published in Padua, likewise in 1629 – Misserini adheres to the traditional title of Divina Commedia.
Batines I, p. 102; Mambelli 55; U. Limentani, “La fortuna di Dante nel Seicento”, Studi secenteschi, 5 (1964), pp. 3-49; Philobiblon, One Thousand Years of Bibliophily, no. 196.