Paduan Printing of Patrizi’s Pastoral Poem
PATRIZI, Francesco.
Egloga de Christi nativitate … [Padua, Printer of Lucianus (H 10276), c. 1482.]
4to, ff. [4]; roman letter, four-line initial space at start of text; cut a little close at head, light marginal foxing; sewn into modern paper wrappers.
Extremely rare first edition of Patrizi’s pastoral poem on the birth of Christ, the first work of his to appear in print.
Francesco Patrizi (1413–1494) has been called ‘the greatest political philosopher of the fifteenth century, and the principal exponent of the “virtue politics” of Renaissance humanism’ (Harvard Patrizi Project), yet he was also the author of a substantial quantity of Latin letters and poetry (he composed at least forty-one poems and 345 epigrams). Patrizi had studied under Francesco Filelfo at the University of Siena before entering public life as a diplomat for the Republic of Siena; he later became a priest and was appointed governor of Foligno in the Papal States as well as bishop of Gaeta. He composed this poem in March 1460 and dedicated it to Pius II, who had become pope in 1458.
The eclogue is firmly based on Virgil’s Eclogue IV, in which the birth of a child and the restoration of the Golden Age was regularly interpreted as a foretelling of the advent of Christ. The verse dialogue here is between the shepherds Lycidas and Menalchas, who are alarmed at the appearance of portents in the sky and given reassurance by an angel; the poem concludes with a welcome from Joseph at the stable door. The heralding of a Golden Age was a theme appearing regularly in fifteenth-century Italian neo-Latin poetry, from Francesco Filelfo onwards, partly as a response to the numerous political troubles and traumas within the Italian peninsula, and occasionally to flatter various rulers or potential patrons.
Just five works have been associated with this particular Paduan printshop, all short works in Latin, one of which is dated 2 January 1482. The typeface has been linked with Leonardus Achates, active in both Padua and Vicenza, and the author of two of the five works was Paduan. Printing at Padua started in the 1470s, but by this time the dominance of Venetian printing was clear, though there were still close links between the university and the Venetian printers, many of whom had shops in Padua.
ISTC records only twelve copies, of which only one in the US (Newberry) and three in the UK (two in the British Library, one in Glasgow).
H 12471*; BMC VII 926; GW M29826; BSB-Ink P-42; ISTC ip00155000.