PLINIUS. Historia naturale di C. Plinio Secondo di latino in volgare tradotta per Christophoro Landino, nuouamente in molti luoghi, doue quella mancaua, supplito, & da infiniti errori emendata, & con somma diligenza corretta, con la tauola similmente castigata, & aggiuntoui molti capitoli, che nelle altre impressioni non erano. Aggiontoui anchora di nuouo la sua vita…

Octavo (207x151 mm), [40] p., DCCCXI p., [41] p., 3 woodcut printer's devices and historiated initials at the beginning of each book. Contemporary Venetian black morocco over pasteboard, panels on side in gilt and blind with central roundel, “Venetian apple” tools on corners, spine with alternating single and double bands, compartments tooled in blind, black edges. Extremities of binding slightly rubbed, but a very fine copy in its first binding.

GBP 5,000

A rare XV century Venetian reprint of the famous 1476 vernacular translation of Pliny's Naturalis Historia by the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498), provided with Landino's prefatory letter to Ferdinand of Aragon, King of Naples, a biography of the author, and a rich index. This edition is one out of the only 16 published in Venice by the typographer Thomas Ballarinus between 1531 and 1535.The 1476 Pliny, a masterpiece of typographic design, was an editorial venture by Girolamo Strozzi, a member of the renowned powerful Florentine banking family, and was printed with Nicolas Jenson's influential Roman types; as a direct consequence, Landino's translation, itself a commission by king Ferdinando of Aragona, enjoyed a great and lasting fortune throughout the first half of the century following its first appearance, and was continually reprinted (only to be replaced by 1543 Antonio Brucioli's and 1561 Lodovico Domenichi's vulgarizations). Pliny the Elder's work is a thirty-seven-book encyclopaedia of all the knowledge of the ancient world, collected on the basis of a wide selection of readings. Dealing with a myriad of aspects of human life such geography, geology, mineralogy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine, history of art, sculpture, painting, letters, folklore..., it represented a fundamental authority for Medieval and Renaissance culture, and still today remains an irreplaceable source of information for the most different fields of Classical studies.

CNCE 30409