TASSO, Torquato.
Il rogo di Corinna, et la fenice ...
Venice, Evangelista Deuch[ino], 1621. [with:] [—.] Il Rinaldo ... Di nuovo riveduto, & con diligenza corretto ... Venice, Evangelista Deuchino, 1621. [and:] [—.] L’Aminta favola boscareccia ... Di novo corretta, & di vaghe figu
Four works in one volume, 12mo, pp. Corinna: 35, [1, blank]; Rinaldo: [11], 12–261, [3]; Aminta: [7], 8–88; Torrismondo: 114; woodcut portrait of Tasso to each title, 9 in-text woodcut illustrations to Aminta; sporadic light foxing, short closed tear to K9 of Rinaldo not touching text; a handsome copy in contemporary French red morocco gilt to a panel design, edges gilt and gauffered; inscriptions to rear endpapers ‘Maria Santissima ora pro nobis’ and ‘Gesu’ mio amor mio’, the former dated 1765, eighteenth-century armorial drawing (Baelde?) to front pastedown; small restorations to corners and at head and foot of spine, clasps wanting.
A strikingly bound copy of Deuchino’s editions of four pastoral plays and epic poems by Tasso.
In 1608, the Trevisan printer Evangelista Deuchino (fl. 1593–1631) formed a partnership with the Venetian bookseller Giovanni Battista Pulciani, with whom he published Tasso’s Rime in six volumes in the same year. ‘Alternating years of intense activity and years of crisis, but raising the quality of his work, Evangelista printed other Tasso editions (the Aminta and the Prose in ’12, the Rime in two volumes in ’20–’22, the Rinaldo in ’21)’ (DBI, trans.).
The works contained here, published between 1621 and 1622, could be obtained individually, and together comprised a third portion of Deuchino’s edition of Tasso’s Rime … divise in amorose, boscherezze, maritime, imenei, heroiche, morali, lugubri, sacre e varie. Torquato’s pastoral Aminta (1573) is here accompanied by Il rogo di Corinna (known also as Il rogo amoroso), Re Torrismondo (first published as Galteato re di Norvegia), and Rinaldo, a celebration ‘of the beauty of the human body, a sensuality which is irrepressible and explosive or which retreats into languor, and of the splendid luxury of courtly feasts; but its freshness and force render it Tasso’s finest work, save for Aminta and Gerusalemme liberata, whose motifs and movements it anticipates’ (ibid.).
Rogo: not in USTC; OCLC finds three copies in the US (Duke, Harvard, Pennsylvania), and none in the UK; not in BM STC Italian. Rinaldo: USTC 4002240; we find three copies in the UK (BL, Edinburgh, V&A), two in the US (Harvard, Yale), and one in Ireland, at Maynooth; BM STC records the 1608 Deuchino only (p. 895). Aminta: USTC 4042182; not in Library Hub; BM STC Italian records the 1608 Deuchino edition only (p. 893). Torrismondo: USTC 4042179; Library Hub finds two copies in the UK (BL, Edinburgh); BM STC Italian, p. 895.
Solerti (1898), pp. 306–8.
