Unexpurgated Emblems
ALCIATI, Andrea; Joannes THUILIUS, editor.
Emblemata cum commentariis Claudi Minois I.C. Francisci Sanctii Brocensis, & notis Laurentii Pignorii Patavini novissima hac editione in continuam unius commentarii seriem congestis … Padua, [(colophon:) Lorenzo Pasquato for] Pietro Paolo Tozzi, 1621.
4to, pp. LXXX, 1003, [1], [2, blank]; without the second final blank Rrr8; with copper-engraved title-page printed to a1, 2 unnumbered and 212 numbered emblematic woodcuts, each printed within woodcut border, woodcut Tozzi device to title, large woodcut Pasquato device to colophon, woodcut initials and tailpieces; very occasional light foxing, pale dampstain to upper margin of a few leaves, nonetheless a very good copy; bound in contemporary vellum over boards, manuscript lettering to spine; most of spine later reinforced in vellum, neat repairs to hinges; seventeenth-century ownership inscription ‘Conventus Santma Annuta Parma | F. Bonaventura a Parma’ to engraved title and p. XXV, ink stamp of the Franciscan Convent of Santissima Annunziata in Parma to title verso (‘C. Ss. A. P.’), nineteenth-century printed shelf-label (obscuring earlier manuscript shelf-label) to front pastedown, nineteenth-century note to rear pastedown ‘lire ital. 15'.
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Emblemata cum commentariis Claudi Minois I.C. Francisci Sanctii Brocensis, & notis Laurentii Pignorii Patavini novissima hac editione in continuam unius commentarii seriem congestis …
First ‘magisterial’ edition (Manning, p. 116), much expanded from the 1618 Padua edition and considered to be the most comprehensive version of Alciati’s Emblemata, with 212 emblematic woodcuts devised by Pignoria, including the formerly expurgated emblem LXXX depicting a defecating woman; yet with early monastic provenance.
This scholarly edition is the first to include all 212 of Alciati’s emblems with accompanying woodcuts, originally devised for the 1618 Tozzi edition by Lorenzo Pignoria and newly edited by Joannes Thuilius (1590–1630), ‘Alciato’s most diligent editor’ (Manning, p. 45). The existing commentaries by the jurist Claude Mignault, the Spanish philologist Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas (1573), and the historian and antiquary Lorenzo Pignoria (1618) have been combined to produce an edition of more than a thousand pages. In contrast to the 1618 edition, Thuilius includes the ‘offensive’ Emblem LXXX, so the numbering now ‘differs from Plantin’s edition of 1573 and 1574 … the eightieth emblem of Plantin’s edition becomes the eighty-first in the Paduan one, and so on’ (Praz, pp. 25–26). It has also been suggested that this emblem resulted in Alciati’s Emblems being prohibited in Spain unless expurgated (Green, p. 255).
Provenance:
For the use of one Fra Bonaventura at the Franciscan convent of Santissima Annunziata in Parma, and later in the convent library, which eventually contained some fifteen thousand volumes; the library was likely partially dispersed when the convent was suppressed in 1866, though the friars returned in 1880.
USTC 4005734; Green, Alciati 152; Landwehr, Romanic 99; Praz, p. 251. See Manning, The Emblem (2002), pp. 116–117.