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85 - [HUMANIST DICTIONARY]. NANI MIRABELLI (Domenico). Polyanthea…
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Estimate €400 - €500
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Description
[HUMANIST DICTIONARY]. NANI MIRABELLI (Domenico). Polyanthea. Second edition of the most famous humanist dictionary of the Renaissance, the Polyanthea, embellished with numerous initial letters employing the brand-new technique of white-line woodcut engraving, as well as two 16th-century manuscript leaves. Saonae (Savona), Simone Bibilaqua [Simone Bevilacqua], 1514. Quarto, bottle-green sheepskin, smooth spine decorated with gilt title and embossed fillets. 20th-century binding. Ccccxxxix pp., [878 pp. and unpaginated plates] and 3 unpaginated blank folios. In Latin. Spine sun-faded and binding rubbed, water-stains and browning on one-fifth of the leaves (more pronounced at the very end), foxing, minor paper losses in the margins except on the last leaf (text damage with loss of text and restoration in the inner margin), a few rare handwritten annotations in the margins. Title page missing and a few introductory leaves missing. One page (ccvii) unprinted. Second edition of one of the greatest humanist dictionaries of the Renaissance: the Polyanthea. First published in 1503 in Savona and then reprinted from the original in several cities shortly afterwards (notably Venice in 1507 and Basel in 1512). This edition was revised and expanded by the author, Dominicus Nanus Mirabellius, a contemporary of Erasmus. Published numerous times up until the 18th century, early editions such as ours contain around 800 entries arranged in alphabetical order. This copy, which is very rare, is seldom cited by bibliographers and may well be the only known printing by Simon Bevilaqua in Savona. Although the title page and the first few introductory leaves are missing, the entire body of the text (from the first entry under the letter A to the final typographical mark, except for the unprinted page ccvii) is present. A notable feature is that this work contains numerous wood-engraved initials, all in white-ground engraving (a wood-engraving technique that uses negative space by inverting the printing areas to produce white letters or figures on a black background), a technique that was entirely new for the time, having been pioneered by Urs Graf (1485–1528) around the 1510s. It also features a few handwritten annotations, most likely from the period, as well as several handwritten marks in ink on a few leaves—signs of a studious reader’s attention—and a handwritten bookplate on the first text leaf. This copy is enriched by two handwritten leaves dated around 1581 in brown ink, each in a different hand: the first text is a religious epigraphic note in Latin and legible capital letters with some smudges and faded ink; the second, on the reverse of the first leaf, is a 14-line poem in Italian, ‘In morte del Sr. Scipion [Guppei?]’, in legible cursive with no smudges; the third, barely legible, is a preface to the work (or a notarial extract concerning its transmission) in Latin, 19 lines in loose cursive, without smudges but with a few ink blots. Water stains on all three leaves and two margins with text loss. A fine bibliophile item, a rare post-incunabulum both for its title and its white-lined initials.
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About the sale Fine antique and collectible books, manuscripts and modern illustrated works
Auction location
Auction time 06/29/2026 at 2:00 PM
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