DANTE Alighieri; [Pietro BEMBO ( editor )]. Le terze rime. [ Title verso :] Lo’nferno e’l Purgatorio e’l Paradiso di Dante Alaghieri [ sic ].

DANTE Alighieri; [Pietro BEMBO ( editor )]. Le terze rime. [ Title verso :] Lo’nferno e’l Purgatorio e’l Paradiso di Dante Alaghieri [ sic ].The First Aldine Dante With a Portrait of the Poet DANTE Alighieri; [Pietro BEMBO (editor)]. Le terze rime. [Title verso:] Lonferno el Purgatorio el Paradiso di Dante Alaghieri [sic]. Venice: Aldus Manutius. 1502. 8vo. Eighteenth century speckled calf, arms of William Bagot, first Bagot Bromley blocked in blind to boards, spine gilt in compartments with gilt crowned fleurs de lys; ff. [243] of [244]; a7 bz8 AG8 H4; lacking f. a8 (Inferno III, lines

The First Aldine Dante – With a Portrait of the Poet

DANTE Alighieri; [Pietro BEMBO (editor)]. Le terze rime. [Title verso:] Lo’nferno e’l Purgatorio e’l Paradiso di Dante Alaghieri [sic]. Venice: Aldus Manutius. 1502.

8vo. Eighteenth-century speckled calf, arms of William Bagot, first Bagot Bromley blocked in blind to boards, spine gilt in compartments with gilt crowned fleurs-de-lys; ff. [243] of [244]; a7 b–z8 A–G8 H4; lacking f. a8 (Inferno III, lines 79–136), f. l2 blank, quires a and b and f. s8 supplied (during the eighteenth century or earlier); italic letter, capital spaces with guide letters, woodcut Aldine device to final verso; joints repaired, front free endpaper previously laid down, obscuring bookplate of Charles Ford (recently renewed with bookplate and label relaid); slight marginal dampstaining to head of Inferno VI–XV and to inner margin of Inferno XXXIII–Purgatorio IV, some browning and light soiling to first and final leaves, the odd mark; else a very good copy; sixteenth-century underlining and reading marks to annotation to c. 50 pp., early inscription to final leaf ‘?andai in Farnesina … al sinodo’; title-page with sixteenth-century ink portrait of Dante in profile within border enclosing printed text (see below), inscribed ‘Φρὰνκισχῶς Αλφάνῶς Νεοπολιτσίν εποιει Εποῦ κυρὶακου’, eighteenth-century armorial bookplate of Charles Ford to front pastedown with motto ‘Noli irritare leones’ (Franks 10949), ?nineteenth-century ownership inscription ‘R. Washbourne’ to head of title, twentieth-century booklabel of D.S. Robertson to front free endpaper.

The first Aldine edition of Dante, our copy with a magnificent ink portrait of Dante in profile executed in 1555 and with the bookplate of Charles Ford, Jonathan Swift’s confidant, close correspondent, and most trusted friend, who played an instrumental role in bringing Gulliver’s Travels to print, clandestinely delivering the manuscript to the publisher and, for the second edition, providing the final corrected copy of Gulliver’s Travels on Swift’s behalf to rectify the unauthorised changes made to the first edition.

This edition – the only appearance of Dante’s Commedia under the title of Le Terze rime – appeared as part of Aldus’s pocket-format octavo series of works, beginning with his Virgil in 1501 and followed by the series’ first vernacular work, Petrarch’s Le cose volgari, in July 1501, edited by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) as here; it was one of the earliest Aldines to employ Aldus’s iconic dolphin-and-anchor device. Bembo’s recension of the Commedia, instrumental in cementing Dante’s importance as a vernacular poet, eliminates abbreviations introduced by Landino and draws largely upon the text of the fourteenth-century manuscript sent by Boccaccio to Petrarch in the 1350s as opposed to early, textually flawed printed editions.

The Aldine Dante formed ‘“il presupposto concreto” (“the concrete prerequisite”) for Bembo’s programme to found a new literary language upon the works of illustrious writers. Fundamental to the humanistic principles of Bembo and Aldus was the idea that language is to be learned not from rules, but from examples. To create illustrious vernacular models in these editions, Bembo applied the esteemed methods of philology that he learned from Poliziano and Barbaro to historical, vernacular texts. The result was editions that both validated the vernacular as a serious field of study and made the authors’ texts available in such a way that they could stabilize the language and hold in check the forces of linguistic change’ (Brammall).

Our copy bears a magnificent ink profile portrait of Dante wearing his traditional cappuccio, the outline of his white coif present more faintly under his hood. For a work dated 1555 (if Robertson’s dating is to be trusted, see below), it is notable that the depiction of Dante should bear more resemblance to representations of the sommo poeta from the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscript tradition – or in early woodcut illustrations of scenes from the Commedia, generally shown in continuous narrative – than to sixteenth-century depictions in painting, or from woodcut frontispiece in printed books.

By this time, Dante’s image had become highly stylised, with increased emphasis on his poetic auctoritas, conveyed by the inclusion of a laurel wreath, and his aquiline nose, severe countenance, and strong jaw, as well as the increased rigidity and gradual shortening of his hood. Holbrook (1911) complains of the diversity of Dantes before the consolidation of his iconography, finding in manuscript sources ‘Dantes with pudgy expressionless faces, Dantes with a feeble jaw and receding chin, Dantes in feminine form with feminine faces, Protean Dantes ever assuming new yet never Dantesque shapes […]’ in which Dante is identified through clothing and gesture rather than what Holbrook also refers to disparagingly as ‘the profile of an old hag’. The departure from later developments in Dante’s iconography largely positions him as pilgrim or Everyman rather than imposing auctor. There are particularly interesting parallels between our portrait and Dante’s dress in Priamo della Quercia’s illustrations to MS Yates Thompson 36, and Guarneriana MS 200, for example, as well as the engravings attributed to Baccio Baldini after designs by Botticelli for the first illustrated edition of the Commedia, printed in 1481 by Niccolò di Lorenzo. ‘Through his active role in the visual narrative the artists represent Dante the pilgrim as an “Everyman”, showing his allegorical role, his role representing mankind itself as “the personification of Christian endeavor, after whom the reader should mold himself in mind and heart” […] While Dante’s actions are painted as his own, the lack of a specific portrait in the early illuminations allows those actions to represent a wider experience, the experience of Everyman rather than those of a particular individual fixed in a specific historical moment. It may be that the illustrators resisted realistic portraits in the Commedia for so long (long after they had emerged elsewhere) because the Everyman concerned them more than an image of the illustrious poet. Such a portrait would confine those actions to the “io” “che è solo io” and limit the breadth of the poet’s experience for the reader/viewer’ (Owen).

The portrait was executed by one Francesco Alfani. The inscription in Greek (‘Φρὰνκισχῶς Αλφάνῶς Νεοπολιτσίν εποιει Εποῦ κυρὶακου’, i.e. ‘?Francesco Alfano the Neapolitan made [this] here for the Lord’) to either side of the portrait is dated by D.S. Robertson to 1555 by means of isopsephy, using the first letter of each word of the inscription (where A=1, Φ=500, N=50, and E=5). This is likely the Francesco Alfani who was doctor of medicine and philosophy and professor of medicine at the University of Salerno, ‘in those days reputed to be the greatest medical school in the world’ and prior of the collegio medico from 1578 (Eager, Early History of Quarantine (1903), p. 15; his 1577 Naples-printed Opus, de peste, febre pestilentiali, & febre maligna, reprinted in Hamburg in 1589 and 1618 according to Crescimbeni. The work was particularly notable for its claim that corrupt air can carry plague over long distances by land or sea.

There was also a translator and vernacular poet of the same name about whom little is known, although he is thought to have been a Florentine descendant of the dolce stil novo poet Gianni Alfani and active during the second half of the fifteenth century, although the Florentine branch of the Alfani family (as opposed to the Neapolitan or Perugian branches) was all but extinct at the time, and traditional attributions to the late fifteenth century, following Crescimbeni, are ‘based on the somewhat generic dating of a manuscript (which Quadrio and Mazzucchelli then followed)’ (Lodone, p. 149, trans.). Although Alfani’s verse remained unpublished, several of his poems are preserved, for example, in MS Riccardiano 1118 (sixteenth century, containing twelve sonnets by Alfani) alongside extracts from Dante’s Vita nuova and works by Boccaccio, Guinizelli, Cino da Pistoia, and others, and he was the interlocutor, with Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542), of a notable tenzone, or poetic exchange. The Laurenziana’s MS Plut. XLI.33 contains works by Alfani alongside those of Bembo, Ariosto, and Machiavelli, and his sonnets also appear in Chig. M. VII.142 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, composed during the first half of the sixteenth century for Giovanni Girolamo de’ Rossi (Bishop of Pavia between 1530 and 1564).

The front free endpaper bears the bookplate of Charles Ford of Woodpark (Wood Park), some ten miles from Dublin. Born to an Irish father and an English mother, Ford was educated at Eton and admitted as a fellow-commoner at Trinity College Dublin, graduating B.A. in 1699. His enduring friendship with Jonathan Swift likely began while Swift (then aged forty-one) was vicar at Laracor, and Ford was twenty-six. In 1712 Swift appointed Ford editor of the London Gazette, and Swift’s close friend and muse Esther Johnson (better known as ‘Stella’) spent six months at Ford’s home at Woodpark; Swift’s poem ‘Stella at Wood Park’ was written to thank Ford, affectionately referred to as ‘Don Carlos’, for his hospitality.

Ford had acted as Swift’s intermediary in bringing the final corrected copy of Gulliver’s Travels to the publisher Benjamin Motte, making sure that Motte’s insertions, deletions, and alterations to the first edition – made without Swift’s consent – were rectified. In the twentieth century, it was revealed through Ford’s letters that Gulliver’s Travels had been composed almost a decade later than previously thought, proving that Swift authored Part I in 1721–2, Part 2 in 1722–3, Part IV in 1723, and Part III (written after Part IV) in 1724–5. Two copies of Swift’s novel survive with significant corrections to the text in Ford’s hand, one at the Morgan and the other at the Forster Collection. Ford named Swift as executor of his will, a role Swift was unable to carry out due to his own declining health. Ford likely obtained this copy of the Commedia during his two-year Grand Tour to Italy in 1717 and 1718; he had previously travelled to the Continent with Bolingbroke. In a poem written for Ford’s birthday in 1722, Swift refers both to his friend’s Italophilia and to his desire to leave Ireland. ‘When to your Friends you would enhance | The Praise of Italy or France | For Grandeur, Elegance, and Wit, | We gladly hear you, and submit: | But then, to come and keep a Clutter | For this, or that Side of a Gutter, | To live in this or t’other Isle, | We cannot think it worth your while’. Ford served as an important source of information for Swift during the satirist’s years in Ireland.

Provenance:
1. Early ownership inscription to final leaf perhaps indicating Roman clerical provenance (’?andai in Farnesina … al sinodo’), with underlining, manicules, and reading marks (‘comp.’) to c. 50 pp., largely evenly spaced but slightly more concentrated within the Purgatorio. There are also occasional manuscript corrections to the text as edited by Bembo, e.g. in Paradiso XIV, in which our reader adds ‘non’ after ‘Si pia l’ombra d’Anchise si porse’, indicating familiarity with an uncommon variant of the terzina, called by Alessandro Piccolomini ‘incorrect, although it appears in some printed editions’ (Piena, et larga parafrase (1572), p. 167, trans.).

2. Sixteenth-century portrait of Dante in brown ink to title, with Greek ownership inscription of Francesco Alfani in the same hand.

3. Bookplate of Charles Ford (c. 1681/2–1743) of Woodpark, near Dublin. Six of Ford’s other Aldines, including the five-volume set of Aldus’s incunable Aristotle (1495-98), are now at Eton, having been given to the school by Lord Berkeley of Stratton, a mutual connection of Swift’s, in 1743.

4. William Bagot, 1st Baron Bagot of Bagot’s Bromley (1728-1798); seemingly not in the sale of books removed from the Bagot estate at Blithfield Hall (Sotheby’s, 26 November 1945), although the sale included his copy of the 1481 Niccolò di Lorenzo edition (lot 74).

5. ?Nineteenth-century ownership inscription of R. Washburn, perhaps the bookseller of the same name on Paternoster Row specialising in Catholic literature and theology.

6. Booklabel of Donald Struan Robertson, scholar of Apuleius, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and friend and correspondent of A. E. Housman. He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. ‘It is not remembered for which birthday he asked for a guinea-pig and a pocket Homer, but a love for literature and the possession of books was his from early days. He would often make the long walk back to Hampstead bearing a volume that he had, by saving his bus-fare, been able to secure in the Charing Cross Road … in Italian he had read all Ariosto and Dante, to whom he constantly returned. He had a series of small notebooks, in which he had copied out favourite passages from these … each day one was carried, in a silk case, in a pocket of his coat, to be read in trains or when the business of a meeting grew tedious’ (F. H. Sandbach, obituary). Not in the Hodgson & Co. sale of his library (22-23 March 1962).

BM STC Italian, p. 209; EDIT16 CNCE 1144; USTC 808768; Index Aureliensis XI, p. 260. See Brammall, ‘Fixity and Fluidity in Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua’, in Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe (2023); Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book (1992). On Alfani the physician, and Alfani the poet, see Crescimbeni, p. 469; De Renzi, Storia documentata della scuola medica di Salerno (1857) 233; Lodone, ‘Per un profilo di Francesco Alfani volgarizzatore e poeta’, in Medioevo e rinascimento XXXII (2018). On Ford, see Smith ed., The Letters of Jonathan Swift to Charles Ford (1935). On the iconography of Dante, see Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael (1911); Landner, Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts (2017); Owen, ‘The Image of Dante, Poet and Pilgrim’, in Dante on View (2016).

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