ARISTOTLE MADE EASY
DOLCE, Lodovico.
Somma della filosofia d’Aristotele, e prima della dialettica.
Venice, Giovanni Battista, & Marchio Sessa, & fratelli, [1565].
[with:]
—. Somma di tutta la natural filosofia di Aristotele ... Venice, Giovanni Battista, & Marchio Sessa, & fratelli, [1565].
Two parts in one vol., 8vo, ff. [4], 132; 104, [4 (including final blank)]; woodcut winged horse device to each part, part II with 4 large woodcuts in the text, 2 showing a mnemonic diagram of the head; free endpapers and pastedowns a little wormed at gutter, two leaves with marginal paperflaws (not affecting text), occasional very light browning; a very attractive copy neatly recased in its original contemporary vellum preserving original endpapers, remains of ties, spine and tail-edge lettered in ink.
First edition of this exposition of Aristotle’s dialectics, moral, and natural philosophy by one of the most significant poligrafi and artistic theorists of the cinquecento, intended for a non-specialist readership.
Although perhaps best remembered for his Dialogo della pittura, Dolce (1508–1568) was a prolific editor, translator, and author, writing dialogues, comedies, and tragedies, translating classical works – including Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and producing annotated texts of great Italian authors, such as Dante and Boccaccio. The Somma della filosofia was part of Dolce’s drive to make important classical authors available to a cultured (though non-specialist) audience.
Dolce was well aware that such summaries were considered by the learned as culturally debasing, noting in his address to the reader that ‘many literary men will show their displeasure that a philosopher of so much esteem is being made familiar to the common people’ (ff. A2v–A3r, trans. Terpening, p. 14). He goes on to justify his work, however: ‘Abbreviating and reducing good authors to a compendium is of very great profit to students, because in large volumes one’s memory gets lost, and before the reader reaches the end, everything read is forgotten … Therefore it may be of no small profit to see the great books of Aristotle recast in convenient brevity … reduced in such form, they can be very easy for everyone’ (f. A2r–A2v, trans. Terpening, pp. 128–9).
BM STC Italian, p. 54; EDIT16 17386; USTC 827121; not in Adams. See Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (1997).
