Dante Alighieri. [Le terze rime di Dante]. (Venice: Aldo Manuzio, August 1502)

First Aldine edition of Dante's Divina commedia; first issue, before the addition of the Aldine device to the verso of the final leaf. Edited by Pietro Bembo, this is the first small-format edition of Dante's canonic narrative poem, uniform with Aldo's other scholarly pocket editions, or enchiridia.

"The Dante edition had no dedicatory letter or introductory address to the readers, but is mentioned by Aldus in the introduction to his 1501 Petrarch as forthcoming, and a much more correct edition than any previous one. In fact, the request of printing privilege for the works of Petrarch and Dante had been jointly submitted to the Venetian Senaꦜte in 1501 by Carlo Bembo, Pietro’s brother and co-heir of Bernardo’s library.

"Dante’s text was edited by Pietro Bembo from an authoritative fourteenth-century manuscript in his father’s library (now Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 3199), identifiable with a codex sent by Giovanni Boccaccio as a gift to Francesco Petrarca in about 1351-53. Pietro’s autograph manuscript of the edited text, which he passed on to Aldus for printing, also survives (Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 3197). … [I]t was the first edition of the poem after 1500 and its text was copied by the majority of subsequent sixteenth-century editors" ("Aldus Manutius: A humanist printer for humanist readers," Cambridge University Library online exhibition; //exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/manutius/). Bembo's supplied title, Le terze rime, was not retained in subsequent editions. According to Simon Gilson, Bembo's title—The Tercets of Dante—"returns us to a context in which Dante's poetry is located within the realm of Italian vernacular verse. The title may even indicate unease with the term Comedy itself, since this had puzzled many early readers and commentators who had failed to see how the style and subject-matter of the poem might fit with conventional late medieval categorizations of the comedy genre" (Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy [Cambridge University Press, 2018], p. 33).

8vo (157 x 97 mm). Italic type, 30 lines plus headline. collation: a-z⁸ (-a1) A-G⁸ H⁴: 243 (of 244) leaves (lacking title-page, supplied in facsimile; l2 bl🅺ank). Three-line initial spaces with guide letters at the beginning of each cantica, manuscript canto numbers at head of each recto and manuscript line numbers at intervals, usually six lines. (Occasional light marginal soiling, H4 repaired at lower inner margin.)

binding: Nineteenth-century English citron morocco (164 x 109 mm), covers panelled with gilt border-roll of vine leaves and grapes and blind frame of palmetto leaves, smooth spine densely gilt with two red morocco labels, plain edges with "Dante" lettered at foot of text block, blue embossed endpapers. (Lightly rubbed, bookplate removed from verso of fro🥂nt free endpaper.)

provenance: LF (or LT?), small nineteenth-century embossed monogram on front pastedown — Charles W. Clark (1871-1933), The Library of Charles W. Clark (San Francisco, 1914), I, p. 35 — possibly the Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia (though not traced in The Collected Catalogues of Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach). acquisition: Purchased from John Fleming, New York, 1962. references: UCLA 59; Adams D83; Aldo Manuzio tipografo 63; Edit16 1144; Renouard 34/5; USTC 808768