Orlando innamorato

Venice: Gli eredi di Lucantonio Giunta, 1541. First edition thus. Fine. Quarto (25 cm); 262 leaves. Title page in red and black. Text in italic type in two columns. In 19th-century polished white vellum, border in gilt with small "chain-link" tool. Spine elaborately gold-tooled in scallop pattern, with blue-dyed title compartment and year. Sky-blue pastepaper endleaves. Lengthy bibliographical note in manuscript on front blank. THIS COPY UNIQUELY SOPHISTICATED, possibly at the time of rebinding, with paper extensions attached to all margins, double-ruled in red ink, effectively adding 5 centimeters to the length of the page, and 2 centimeters to the fore-edge, and an attractive border to the text.. Odd. All edges gilt.

References: Edit 16 5539; Fontanini, I, 258 f (noting as "scandalose" and "detestibili" the poem's libidinous passages); Camerini, 452 ("di singolare rarità"); Gamba, 161 ("Rarissimo"); Renouard, Notice sur la famille des Juntes, xxx ("Elle est très rare"); Tiraboschi, VI, 1165 ("riputato tuttora un de' migliori tra poemi epici romanzeschi"); Harris, Bibliografia dell' "Orlando innamorato", 1, 31. (Harris gives priority to a 1542 counterfeit edition published in Milan, a notion first proposed by the early 20th-century bibliographer Andrea Sorrentino, and is contradicted in the strongest possible terms by Camerini.)


The bookseller's jargon term "first edition thus" doesn't usually mean much, but this case is different. Matteo Maria Boiardo's chivalric romance first saw print in stages between 1483 and 1506 (some editions are lost or exist in unique copies). The poem was complex, imaginative, energetic, and inspirational (to Ariosto, among others), but was also considered flat-footed, steeped in dialect, uncareful with syntax, rhythmically flawed, and unfinished. Beginning around 1530, the Florentine satirist Francesco Berni, began his adoring "rifacimento," polishing nearly every line of the massive text, eliminating the perceived rough edges, bringing it into line with the sophisticated tastes of Pietro Bembo's generation. Berni effectively became the poem's co-author. Whether Berni truly "improved" Boiardo's text is not our concern (the answer was yes until very recently). The book, here presented in its very rare first edition, remains a milestone in the development of the Italian language during the sixteenth century. Among Berni's embellishments is an eyewitness description in verse of the 1527 sack of Rome.