A Cornucopia of Classical Commentary
PEROTTO, Niccolò, and Benedetto BRUGNOLO, editor.
Cornucopi[a]e nuper emendatum a domino Benedicto Brugnolo: ac mirifice concinnatum cum tabula prioribus aliis copiosiori utiliori faciliorique. [Milan], Giovanni Giacomo and brothers da Legnano [for Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler, 28 October 1510 (colophon)].
Folio, ff. [1], cols 1268, ff. [48]; index bound at end; title in gothic letter, woodcut angel device of Giovanni Giacomo da Legnano and brothers at head of title (CNCM 1148), 3-, 4-, 8-, and 14-line woodcut initials, capital spaces with guide letters (see below); sporadic foxing and toning, particularly to index, light soiling and neat repairs to title, paperflaw to blank margin of d8 with small loss, inkstain to e4 affecting legibility of two words; a good copy, slightly trimmed, in twentieth-century vellum-backed boards, spine gilt directly; occasional early underlining and marking.
Added to your basket:
Cornucopi[a]e nuper emendatum a domino Benedicto Brugnolo: ac mirifice concinnatum cum tabula prioribus aliis copiosiori utiliori faciliorique.
Scarce Milanese edition of Perotto’s Cornucopiae, an encyclopaedic commentary to the first book of Martial’s epigrams, here with a curious combination of woodcut initials and capital spaces with guide letters.
Written in Nicolò Perotto’s (1429–1480) native Sassoferrato and first published posthumously in 1489 following revisions by his son, the Cornucopiae incorporates thousands of quotations from ancient authors and comments upon nearly every word of Martial’s epigrams, with a vast index and text ordered in numbered columns for ease of reference. Editing the present text was the final project undertaken by Benedetto Brugnolo (d. 1502), who corrected and expanded the index with three thousand new words shortly before his death.
The present edition is the product of several intergenerational partnerships: in 1502 Giovanni Angelo Scinzenzeler had published an edition of the Cornucopiae as edited by Brugnolo for the printer, bookseller, and paper-maker Giovanni da Legnano – the father of the brothers Legnano whose device appears at the head of the title – dubbing Brugnolo the ‘Cicero veronensis’ in his letter to the reader. The elder da Legnano had also enjoyed several years of collaboration with the Bavarian-born Milanese printer Ulrich Scinzenzeler (fl. 1477–1500), father of Giovanni Angelo. The da Legnano brothers have here employed a veritable cornucopia of visual styles, utilising a wide variety of woodcut initials; often incongruous in style and sophistication, they appear largely toward the end of the work, with up to six initials to a page. The workshop, however, appears to have run out of four-line Qs and Os, which are cleverly replaced by capital spaces with guide letters.
Scarce outside continental Europe. We find two copies in the US (Boston Public Library, Detroit Public Library), and none in the UK.
EDIT16 49929; USTC 847568.