In a fine, contemporary Roman binding

Gonzaga, Scipione (1542-1593).

Commentariorum rerum suarum Libri tres. Accessit liber quartus Παραλειπομενων auctore Josepho Marotto. Quos Valentius Gonzaga Card, primum edidit et Cajetano Fratri inscripsit. Rome, Giovanni Generoso Salomoni, Salvatore Bombelli, and Giuseppe Drudi, 1791.

Large 4° (276x200 mm). Printed on blue paper. [16], 430, [2] pages. Engraved vignette on the title-page presenting an allegory of the city of Mantua, executed by M. di Pietro, who was also responsible for the engraved vignettes on fols. A1r, K1r, and Aa4r. Engraved portrait of the author on the verso of fol. b4. One engraved plate between fols. Zz2 and Zz3, bearing another portrait of Gonzaga along with his family’s coat of arms. Engraved decorated initials and headpiece. Fine contemporary Roman red morocco. Covers within an elaborate gilt frame. Spine with five raised bands; compartments richly gilt tooled. Title in gold on olive morocco lettering-piece. Board edges decorated with small foliate tools, marbled pastedowns and flyleaves, inside dentelles. Gilt edges. Spine slightly discoloured. A very good, wide-margined copy, printed on thick paper.

Provenance: the twentieth-century bibliophile Arturo Dazza (ex-libris on the front flyleaf).

A fine copy – housed in a handsome contemporary red morocco binding executed in a Roman workshop for a distinguished, if unidentified recipient – of the first edition of the Commentarii by the learned Cardinal Scipione Gonzaga.

Gonzaga composed the work in 1579, although it first appeared in print only in 1791. He is well known for having been the patron of the celebrated poet Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), and the Commentarii also includes a reference to an important manuscript of the Gerusalemme liberata, then in the hands of the Gonzaga family. The work – originally comprising three Books – is supplemented in this Roman edition with a fourth Book, titled ‘Paralipomeni’, which is intended as a continuation of Gonzaga’s treatise and was compiled by the abbot and then professor of eloquence at the Jesuit Collegio Romano, Giuseppe Marotto. Another copy issued on blue paper is preserved in the library of the University of Illinois.

S. Gonzaga, Autobiografia. Introduzione e traduzione di Dante Della Terza. In appendice ristampa anastatica dell’edizione latina del 1791, Modena 1987.