Velvet and Silver
LOMBARDI, Giovanni Francesco.
Oratio habita in synodo Tridentina die sancti Stephani protomartyris anno M. D. LXI. Brescia, Lodovico Sabbio, [1561?].
4to, pp. [11], [1, blank]; woodcut arms of Pius IV (nude supporters censored in ink) and typographic ornament to title, large woodcut initial; a few very slight stains, small excision to upper outer corner; recased in early red velvet richly embroidered in silver threads with large central arms to each board and a foliate border; silver tarnished, minor losses, repairs to edges and spine; twentieth-century gilt red morocco book label of Josy Mazodier to front pastedown.
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Oratio habita in synodo Tridentina die sancti Stephani protomartyris anno M. D. LXI.
First edition of this sermon delivered at the Council of Trent, in a magnificent Italian embroidered binding for a Cardinal.
Lombardi’s sermon takes the protomartyr St Stephen as its subject, and was delivered on the saint’s feast day. Traditionally venerated as the first martyr of Christianity, Stephen was a deacon in the early church at Jerusalem who was accused of blasphemy and stoned to death, his execution witnessed by the future St Paul.
Lombardi’s oration includes praise for Pope Pius IV, who had been elected to the pontificate two years earlier, for his tireless work ‘in tanto religionis Christianae turbine’, hoping that under his direction ‘as many as have been deceived for forty-five years by the diabolical fraud of heresies, freed from Satan’s snares by the grace of Christ, may repent and escape the ruin of eternal death, living within the one Ark of Noah, which was a type of the one Church’ (trans.). Pius’s greatest achievement was indeed the reassembling and successful conclusion of the Council of Trent.
The sermon proved popular: it was reprinted in Lombardi’s native Naples in 1562, and again in Brescia in 1563. Lombardi also penned two works on balneology.
EDIT16 CNCE 30087; USTC 838535.