italian

The earliest portrait of Leopold Bloom? Mariette Lydis contributed one illustration to the first issue of “900”, placed with the fragment of Ulysses in the French translation by Auguste Morel. The image is clearly identifiable as a Leopold Bloom-like figure, yet is perhaps not a direct illustration (what are we to make of the Ostende tourist poster in the background?). It is dated 1925 in the lower corner and is captioned ‘Illustration’ at the foot. No earlier illustration of Bloom is known (nor indeed any earlier illustration of Ulysses) and the standard idea of him is drawn partly from Joyce’s own inept sketch of him made in Paris in 1926.

Joyce was nominally a joint editor of the radical literary review “900”, with Massimo Bontempelli. Mariette Lydis was Bontempelli’s lover at this period (her letters to him are preserved at the Getty Institute) and probably also know Joyce. She sketched his portrait the following year in Paris.

The Ulysses excerpt translated by Morel is episode 4, ‘Calypso’, introducing Leopold Bloom with his morning visit to the butcher’s shop for a kidney for Molly’s breakfast. James Joyce is listed among the journal’s editors on the half-title verso (along with Bontempelli, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jerog Kaiser and Pierre Mac Orlan). Among the adverts at the end of the volume is a full-page for the forthcoming German edition of Ulysses by Rheinverlag of Zurich (the book appeared in the autumn of 1927). Another advert is for the journal Critica Fascista (a ’Fornightly Fascist Review’). Slocum & Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce (953), D25 (p. 113).

First edition of this parallel text edition, which is the third edition in English, after Hoby’s translation of 1561 and Samber’s of 1724. For a translator of such a substantial text, very little attention has been paid to the identity of ‘A.P. Castiglione’ and not much is known about him. He appears to have been a political refugee and a language tutor, to judge by the wording of his dedication to the King: ‘Your Majesty’s happy Realm, which has long been an Asylum to the distressed in every Nation, will now become so much their Countrey, that the Peace they enjoy in it, can alone incline them to think it not so. When your gracious Intention to establish Professors of the Modern Languages was made public I embrac’d with Pleasure the first Opportunity for expressing my Gratitude towards a generous People, among whom, as at first I was brought by Conscience, I am likely ever to remain by Inclination.’

He evidently enjoyed the patronage of Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, who is thanked in ‘To the Reader’ and who appears among the subscribers (taking 12 copies). The fine engraved portrait of Castiglione in his edition is by George Vertue after the portrait in the Louvre by Raphael. The work concludes with a fine woodcut tailpiece with a medallion portrait., perhaps cut especially for this edition.

An anti-Napoleonic tract, describing the French victories in Italy under Napoleon in 1796, under the figure of the Roman conquest of Greece. Having published more than one such critiques, Barzoni had fled Venice in 1797. First published in 1797 under false imprint, there were numerous editions and issues of I Romani nella Grecia with ‘London’ imprints like this, probably all printed in Venice.

Appended to this copy, probably contemporaneously are four popular patriotic songs or verses of a type which would have circulated semi-clandestinely in manuscripts like these. One is entitledL ‘Alfieri all sua Patria’. This edition not in ESTC, which lists a 1797 edition with the F. Rivington and G. Robinson imprint, and several other editions 1797-9.

First edition in Russian of Beccaria’s Dei Delittie e delle Pene (1764) translated from the French version of Morellot. In his fundamental Enlightenment legal treatise Beccaria opposed the death penalty and ‘maintained that the gravity of the crime should be measured by its injury to society and that the penalty should be related to this’ (Printing and the Mind of Man).

Long before its echo in Dostoevsy’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Beccaria’s work left its mark on Russian culture. It was enthusiastically read (in French) by Catherine the Great while codifying her own celebrated legal manifesto, Nakaz, of which almost a third of the text came directly from Beccaria, alongside major borrowings from Montesquieu’s L’Ésprit des lois. Given Catherine’s intellectual omnipotence it is perhaps unsurprising that no Russian edition of Beccaria appeared during her reign, even though its spirit imbued her widely disseminated Nakaz — required reading for anyone involved in Russian law and government. Thus Beccaria’s principles came to serve as ideals for future legislators in Russia and were fully incorporated into Russian criminal law by the end of the nineteenth century.

‘The first [Russian] translation of Beccaria came out in 1803. It was done by the poet D. Yazykov from the French translation by Morellet, edited by Roederer in 1797... the translation is one of the best in Russian. It manages to convey not only the ideas of the treatise but also the spirit, the language of Beccaria and his contemporaries. It is dedicated to Alexander I...’ (Cizova).

Dmitry Ivanovich Yazykov (1773-1845), writer, translator, academician and director of the Ministry of Public Education later published a translation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois in 1809–14. Cf. Printing and the Mind of Man 209. Rare: Worldcat lists only the NYPL and Yale copies in anglophone countries. T. Cizova, ‘Beccaria in Russia.’ Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 40, No. 95 (Jun. 1962), pp. 384-408.

A scarce little language tutor, first published some time before 1847, this edition with the account of a journey to London presented as dialogues and other useful examples. Millhouse was a tutor at Milan and produced a popular English-Italian dictionary.

A handsome Romantic reinterpretation of Vignola’s classic Renaissance manual of perspective, Due regole della prospettiva pratica (1582, with many later editions). Elements of Vignola’s diagrams are adapted for the oblong format of the book and often updated with figures and buildings in contemporary style. Bossi, about who we have been able to discover almost nothing beyond this manuscript, also adds a fine sequence of 4 coloured illustrations depicting furniture designs in the French Empire style by Percier and 17 superb monochrome views and interiors, 13 of which are in a sequence with their own decorative title-page ‘Aggiunta di alcune prospettive ricavae da classici autori.’�

This French adaptation of Machiavelli’s fable Belfagor arcidiavolo (’The Devil takes a Wife’) was probably the version used by La Fontaine for the fable Belphégor he included in the last volume of his Fables (1693). Le Fèvre’s version had first appeared in a very rare edition of 1661 (OCLC lists the Bn de France copy only) and this 1664 edition has Le Fèvre’s version of Plutarch’s Theseus added. The printer and place of publication has been deduced from copies in which it is bound with Le Fèvre’s Les Poètes grecs (also 1664).

Classicist Tanneguy Le Fèvre had been inspector of the Imprimerie royale at the Louvre before his appointment as professor at the protestant Académie at Saumur. He courted controversy with several of his works, judged libertine by his contemporaries, notably his biography of Sappho, in which he desisted from censuring her sexuality. Gay, III, 48, cf. Cioranescu 41672 (1661).

First edition, privately printed. The limitation notice reads ‘This Edition is issued to Subscribers only and limited to two hundred and fifty copies, numbered and signed by the Author. The price will be doubled after first of March, 1931’. This copy is, however, unsigned and unnumbered. The work forms issue no. 5 of The Lugano Series.

‘From 1920 until 1937 Douglas was settled in Florence... As his fame grew, he became much visited by inter-war writers, and forged close friendships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher. During these years he lived with the publisher Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli, who helped him publish several limited editions, most of which were later commercially published in London... In 1937 Douglas was forced to flee Florence after the police made enquiries concerning his friendship with a ten-year-old local girl’ (Katherine Mullin in Oxford DNB).

First edition of these edited extracts from the Florentine chronicler Villani, with lives of Boccaccio, Bardi, Giotto, Paulus Geometrus (the mathematician and tutor to Boccaccio) and Cavalcanti, among others. There are several accounts of Italian medical practitioners, including Taddeo, Torrigiano and Dino and Tommaso del Garbo. The Villani family were the leading contemporary chroniclers of fourteenth-century Florence and Filippo was responsible for extending the chronicles of his father and uncle, adding famous portraits of his contemporaries. Towards the end of his life he was appointed public reader of the Divine Comedy and he died in 1404. His chronicle remained in manuscript before being published by the Brescian historian Mazzuchelli in 1747 in this version which was several times reprinted.

First edition of this play, copy on large and thick paper. Marescalchi was born in Bologna, then in the Papal States, on 26 February 1754, into a noble family, he became a hereditary member of the Senate of that town. He later supported Napoleon in Italy and prospered under his patronage.

Quinto Sectani was the pseudonym used by Sienese born poet and papal official Lodovico Sergardi. His fourteen Latin satires mocked contemporary Roman society and, more particularly, the poet and jurist Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina. In 1690 Gravina was instrumental in creating the Accademia degli Arcadi, founded with the intention of reforming Italian poetry. Gravina’s writing was steeped in influences from the classical past, resulting from his researches into Roman law and history, which was an attitude quite in tune with his fellow Arcadians early attempts to return to classical perfection in poetry. The Academy, however, soon found itself reverting to fashionable baroque style, a tendency deplored by Gravina, who tried to suppress any such decadent backsliding. He alienated many of his former friends and colleagues and was the butt of frequent satires.

Despite the claim of the title page (‘nunc primum in lucem editae’) the Satyrae first appeated at Rome, with the same false imprint, in 1696 There seem to have been several early pirated editions, as might be expected for a scurrilous work, which accused Gravina of both pedantry and paedophilia (Susan Dixon, Between the real and the ideal: the Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome, 2006). Worldcat lists a single copy of this edition (Wake Forest University, NC).

First edition of this Jesuit missionary Hindustani-Portuguese grammar, the former language rendered in arabic characters.

First edition. Considered to be the best play the author wrote in the traditional medium, a landmark in the history of the Italian theatre. The author was later the first Italian playwright to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.