L’Asino d’Oro di Lucio Apuleio Filosofo Platonico. Tradotto nuouamente in lingua uolgare dal melto Ill. Sig. Pompeo Vizani Nobile Bolognese.

Venice: Heredi dell’Imberti, 1644. Hardcover. Good+. 8vo (150 x 94mm). 325pp. Later vellum. Signatures: +(8), A-T(8), V(4). Woodcut printer’s device with bird on three hills and monogram GI within cartouche frame. Over 60 in-text rectangular woodcuts depicting of scenes from the “Metamorphoses”; (title and few signatures intermittently browned, some ink burning on title, margins trimmed; otherwise complete and good). Some early provenance is evident; the title page is inscribed in a 17th century hand by “Carlo Bulgarini” possibly the nobleman Carlo Bulgarini of Mantua (d. 1685) whose family was known to have prolific book collections in Italy and France; most famously is the library of his grandfather Bellisario Bulgarini, circa 1560 to 1660. Later owned in the mid-19th century by the Italian historian and nobleman Marchese Cesare Campori (1814-1880), whose ownership label is on the verso front endpaper. Pictorial bookplate of Kirby Flower Smith (1862-1918), professor of Latin and humanistic studies at Johns Hopkins University, on front pastedown. Latin editions of the Apuleian Roman verse satire, the Metamorphoses, were some of the earliest works to be printed at the dawn of the print age. In 1518, Io. Zoppino and his compagno published the first edition of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Italian translation made from the authoritative manuscript at the Monastery of Monte Cassino. The Metamorphoses was reprinted several times over the 16th and 17th centuries; appearing here in 1644 in Italian after the translation of the Bolognese patrician, Pompeo Vizani. Later printings used the well-known colloquial title, “The Golden Ass,” given by the Church Father St. Augustine of Hippo. Vizani prepared this “newly translated” edition after other translations of “The Golden Ass” by Agnolo Firenzuola and Matteo Maria Boiardo were retired. The woodcuts here are those used in Zoppino’s original edition and reprinted in several editions of “The Golden Ass” well into the 17th century. “The Golden Ass,” written with its pointed sense of irony and taste for the asinine, was a favorite narrative at European courts during the Renaissance and early Baroque, especially well-received at the court of Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1431-1505) who was known to circulate it within his crowds. It is not surprising then that our copy has an early provenance that ties it to some named figures of Italian nobility.