One of the supreme masterpieces of the art of printing
5 COLONNA, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Venice: Aldus Manutius [for Leonardus Crassus], 1499 £400,000 Folio (317 × 222 mm). Eighteenth- century speckled sheep, spine richly gilt in compartments, red label, marbled endpapers and edges. With 172 woodcuts, 11 full-page (the Priapus cut uncensored), now usually attributed to Benedetto Bordone ( c .1455/60–1530, active mainly in Venice from 1488); 39 woodcut initials. Roman, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew types. Engraved pictorial bookplate of the Swiss bibliophile Paul Schlesinger (1897–1977) designed by J. F. Junod on front free endpaper verso, subsequently the property of a Swiss family, later library label at foot of spine. Some minor discreet restoration to binding, intermittent light soiling and marks (including to title page, and ink marks in margins of P6v, Q4r, and C6r), continuous damp stain (primarily in upper margins), stronger initially but receding towards centre to leave majority of main text bright and clean, minor worming (mostly single hole, sometimes affecting text but without loss of sense) to first c .50 leaves, first and last gatherings strengthened at gutter with paper strips, neat paper repair at outer edge of pi4, early ink annotations in margins of A2r and of Priapus woodcut, ink additions within woodcuts on T4v, T6v, and X4v. Overall a very good copy. ¶ Aldinen-Slg. Berlin 49 & 50; BMC V, 561; Essling 1198; Goff C–767; GW 7223; HC *5501; IDL 1353; IGI 3062; ISTC ic00767000; Renouard Alde 21.5; Sander 2056. Helen Barolini, Aldus and his Dream Book: An Illustrated Essay , 1992; N. Harris, “Nine Reset Sheets in the Aldine ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (1499)”, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch , 2006, pp. 245–75.
First edition of this highly prized incunable, referred to as the most beautiful illustrated book of the Renaissance, the epitome of Aldine design, and one of two “supreme masterpieces of the art of printing” alongside the Gutenberg Bible (George Painter, quoted in Barolini, p. 6). This copy is in the first state, with the nine sheets as described by Harris all in the original setting. The Priapus woodcut is unexpurgated, despite being censored in the vast majority of copies. The typeface used here, based on ancient Roman inscriptions, was created by Aldus’s type designer Francesco Griffo of Bologna especially for this book, which has long been admired for its harmonious marriage of text and image. Its typographical innovations include distorting the traditional layout of the text into elegant shapes. There is use of Greek fonts, as well as one of the earliest examples of Hebrew type, and a small sample of Arabic, the first Arabic to be printed in the history of European publishing. The spare and elegant illustrations reveal a careful study of ancient art, as well as an interest in the new science of one-point linear perspective. The beauty of these anonymous woodcuts has led scholars, through the years, to associate their design with such famous artists as Andrea Mantegna, Gentile Bellini, or the young Raphael. Several sequential double page illustrations add a visual dimension to the progression of the narrative, anticipating the aesthetic of the strip cartoon. There is an obsession with movement throughout, the illustrations often giving the impression of bodies moving from one page to the next. The text itself remains an enigma, written in a strange hybrid of Latin vocabulary imposed upon Italian syntax. The authorship is indicated by the acrostic formed by 38 of the 39 woodcut initials, thought to be a Dominican monk who belonged to the monastery of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, and at the supposed time of composition of the work in 1467 was teaching novices in Treviso.
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SIXTY FINE ITEMS
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