LUCRETIUS.
Titi Lucretii Cari de rerum natura libri VI. Ad optimorum exemplarium veritatem exacti. Quae praeterea in hac Patavina editione accesserint, epistolae subsequentis postremae paginae declarant.
Padua, Giuseppe Comino [for Volpi], 2 January 1721.
8vo, pp. xl, 427, [3 (colophon, catalogue)], [2 (blank)]; with copper-engraved vignette to title, woodcut initials and head- and tailpieces, woodcut armorial Volpi device to colophons (one dated 1720); lower blank margin of title excised, some occasional very light spotting and staining, but a very good, fresh copy; in contemporary Italian vellum over boards, spine lettered directly in gilt, edges speckled red and green.
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Titi Lucretii Cari de rerum natura libri VI. Ad optimorum exemplarium veritatem exacti. Quae praeterea in hac Patavina editione accesserint, epistolae subsequentis postremae paginae declarant.
First Volpi–Comino edition of Lucretius’s famous materialist and Epicurean poem, the most notable Italian edition of the eighteenth century. The present work is the product of the long-running and fruitful collaboration between the printer Giuseppe Comino and the scholars Giovanni Antonio Volpi (1686–1766), professor of philosophy and later of Classics at Padua, and his brother Gaetano. Despite its fame, the Volpi-Comino edition is in fact very closely copied from Thomas Creech’s (Oxford, 1695), even reprinting much of his and Tonson’s prefaces.
Bound at the end is a two-page catalogue of Volpi–Comino editions, often absent, listing available books published between 1717 and 1721.
Guido Milanese, ‘Italian commentaries on Lucretius’ in Classical Commentaries: Explorations in a scholarly genre (ed. Kraus & Stray, 2015), pp. 195-215 (‘the only interesting book produced in Italy in this field [in the eighteenth century]’).
