The Cottesloe Military Library

The Cottesloe Military Library

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 279. Lume di marte occorente al arte militare, Parma, 1540, later vellum.

Lume di marte occorente al arte militare, Parma, 1540, later vellum

Auction Closed

November 19, 05:30 PM GMT

Estimate

500 - 700 GBP

Lot Details

Description

LUME DI MARTE

Lume di marte occorente al arte militare amplissimo con bellissimi exempli occorsi in Ittalia & for de Ittalia da illustri signori colonelli et dignissimi capitanei al secul nostro. (Parma: Antonio Viotti for Ippolito Ferrarese, 1540)


8vo (147 x 95mm.), 12 ff., a-c4, title within woodcut border, 2 woodcut illustrations, woodcut printer's device beneath colophon, final leaf blank, modern vellum, small section of vellum pasted to head of a2, final text leaf stained with a small hole affecting one letter


RARE. Edit16, USTC and Worldcat record one copy only, in the British Library. Most of Ippolito's publications survive in single or few copies.


Ippolito Ferrarese (or da Ferrara) was a peddler who commissioned works in various towns across northern Italy. He was active in publishing from at least 1531 until his death in 1545, and his name appears in works printed in Pesaro, Venice, Brescia, Milan, Perugia, Bologna, and Parma (as here). This is one of two works from Parma in 1540, with different imprints (the other names Francesco da Prato) but using the same typographical material and title-page border. Most of Ippolito's publications are chapbooks containing ballads or other verses, but this is a prose treatise on the art of war, with no mention of an author, although the preface seems to indicate that Ippolito himself could be the author; "questo mio minimo tratatello de arte militare il quale al presente ho fatto inprimer".


LITERATURE:

Edit16 64498; Sander 4061 (recording a copy sold by Olschki in 1923); Giancarlo Petrella, "Ippolito Ferrarese, a travelling cerretano and publisher in sixteenth-century Italy, in Print culture and peripheries in Early Modern Europe, ed. Benito Rial Costa (Leiden, 2013), 201-226


PROVENANCE:

purchased from Librairie Montgenet, Geneva, 14 October 1938, 30 CHF