Comento di Christophoro Landino fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri Poeta fiorentino.

Folio (314x210 mm). Collation: [I]⁸, a-z⁸, &⁸, cum⁸, rum⁸, A⁸, B⁶, C-I⁸, K⁶, L⁸. [10],cc lxxxxi, [1] leaves. Text in one column, surrounded by commentary on 61 lines. Type: 108R (text), 80R (commentary). Woodcut printer's device on fol. L8r. Four full-page woodcuts, within a richly historiated border (fols. a1v, s1v, C1r; the woodcut opening thePurgatorio is repeated also on fol. s2v; the shield included in the lower panel of the borders filled in in ink in an early hand). Ninety-seven woodcut vignettes, illustrating all the others cantos. Six nine-line decorated initials; numerous smaller initials on black ground. Blind-tooled brown leather binding, over pasteboards (probably a previous remboîtage). Covers framed within floral roll, with a centre medallion with the inscription ‘fratrvm minorvm capvcinorvm'. Two metal clasps (the upper one entirely preserved), dark edges. A beautiful, wide-margined copy. Occasionally browned and stained, pale finger-marks, a short tear at the lower blank margin of fol. e5, a few thin wormholes at the upper blank margin of some leaves. Some marginal notes in a later hand.

Provenance: ‘Questo libro sie demj aluixe m de m. zuan stasino .1499.' (contemporary ownership inscription on the verso of the last leaf, probably one Alvise, a member of the Stasino family, originally from Morea); Livio Ambrogio collection.

The rare first fully illustrated Commedia, printed in Venice; an edition of considerable importance in the history of printing as being the first edition to contain a complete cycle of images for each cantica, and the first edition to include Landino's commentary as revised by Pietro da Figino, recently identified as Pietro Mazzanti da Figline, a Tuscan theologian who preached in Venice in 1489-1490.What gives this edition a special interest is its illustrative apparatus, which goes far beyond all previous illustrated editions: there are one hundred woodcuts, one for each of the poem's cantos, including the three full-page illustrations at the beginning of eachcantica. For the images the printers Bernardino Benali and Matthio da Parma employed the ‘popular artist' who illustrated the 1490 Malermi Bible, identified by Lilian Armstrong as the Master of the Pliny of Pico della Mirandola. The small ‘b' visible in some woodcuts probably indicates the cutter, rather than the artist. For the first two cantiche – Infernoand Purgatorio – the illustrator used earlier cycles, when available, as models, above all the woodcuts designed for the Brescia Dante. For the Paradiso there were no previous woodcut illustrations and the Pico Master therefore created an entirely new sequence of images, basing himself not on the manuscript tradition (the Paradiso is less frequently illustrated in the illuminated codices of the Commedia), but essentially on Landino's commentary and on his own reading of the poem.The edition is one of the finest examples from the golden age of Venetian book illustration. The woodcuts were often imitated, adapted or simply copied by other illustrators in subsequent editions of the Commedia, until the appearance of the new woodcut cycle designed for the Marcolini Dante of 1544.