Celebrating the Birth of the Last Male Habsburg
MARCHESE, Annibale.
Poema per la nascita del serenissimo Leopoldo arciduca d’Austria principe delle Asturie dedicato alla augustissima Elisabetta imperadrice [sic] regnante, e regina delle Spagne. Naples, Felice Mosca, 1716.
8vo, pp. [8], 142, [2 (blank)], with 6 copper-engraved plates; woodcut and typographic head- and tailpieces; quire C browned, some light foxing to first few leaves and last two quires, nonetheless a very good copy; bound in contemporary mottled sheep, borders roll-tooled in gilt, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, edges gilt; a little rubbed and scuffed, headcap chipped, a few small wormholes to spine; nineteenth-century shelflabels to spine and to front pastedown.
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Poema per la nascita del serenissimo Leopoldo arciduca d’Austria principe delle Asturie dedicato alla augustissima Elisabetta imperadrice [sic] regnante, e regina delle Spagne.
Rare first edition of this verse encomium to the newborn Leopold, Archduke of Austria, the last direct male descendant of the Habsburg house, who would live only seven months.
The Neapolitan poet Annibale Marchese (1686–1753) is best known for his Tragedie cristiane of 1729. His lengthy verse praise of the Habsburgs, in three canti of eighty-three, ninety-three, and ninety-four stanzas, was evidently composed and published in a hurry: the dedication is dated less than a month after Leopold’s birth, and the author includes at the end a stanza accidentally omitted from the body of the text due to the printer’s haste, as well as a repeated apology for any errors readers might encounter. Leopold would die in November 1716 after a period of illness; his father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, died without a male heir in 1740, leading to the War of the Austrian Succession and the election of Charles VII as the first non-Habsburg Emperor in three hundred years.
The striking engravings are the work of Neapolitan engravers Andrea and Giuseppe Magliar; alongside portraits of the parents Charles VI and Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, engraved plates accompanying each canto show battle scenes below and Leopold and his parents above, also including fiddling merfolk, putti with garlands, and Christ depicted with a triangular halo.
OCLC and Library Hub find three copies in the US (Getty, Harvard, Illinois) and only one in the UK (CUL).