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View full screen - View 1 of Lot 69. Dante | Commedia, Venice, Spira, 1477, in a pastiche Farnese binding and casket by Hagué.

Dante | Commedia, Venice, Spira, 1477, in a pastiche Farnese binding and casket by Hagué

Lot Closed

July 11, 11:09 AM GMT

Estimate

50,000 - 70,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Dante Alighieri


La Commedia [commentary by Jacopo della Lana, edited by Christofal Berardi]. Jacopo della Lana: Credo; Bosone de Gubbio: Sopra la Commedia; Jacopo Alighieri: Sopra la Commedia; Pseudo-Dante Alighieri: Il Credo; Giovanni Boccaccio: Vita di Dante. [Venice]: Vindelinus de Spira, 1477


Super-Chancery folio (286 x 204mm.), 374 leaves (of 376, without blank a1 and final blank), ā-ē8; a-i K10 l8; m8 n-s10 t-v8 x-y10; aa-gg10 hh-ii8 KK-OO10 PP12, double column, 49 lines plus headline, gothic type, 3- to 12-line initials supplied in red and/or blue, smaller red and blue paraphs (probably executed later), ruled in red, pastiche of a sixteenth-century binding by Hagué, wooden boards covered with gold-painted leather, central arms of the Farnese family within an interlaced panel of grotesque decoration on a stippled ground, spine in compartments with similar decoration, covers each with four corner bosses in the shape of a head, metal shoes and heels, single clasp incorporating the same boss, edges gilt and gauffered and coloured with the Farnese arms beneath a cardinal's hat on the foredge, strip from a medieval manuscript along gutter of first leaf, in a matching wooden casket with metalwork decoration, the cover featuring the same bosses, the inside of the box painted gold, with a red satin padded wrap for the book, occasional light marginal foxing, some light discolouration to binding


This is the seventh edition of Dante's Comedy (the first editions appeared in 1472), and the first to contain a commentary; the editor, Cristoforo Berardi, also included Boccaccio's life of Dante and other supplementary texts as well as rubrics at the start of each cantica. It is printed in gothic rather than roman type, unlike all the other incunabular editions.


IN A FINE HAGUE BINDING WITH THE ARMS OF CARDINAL FARNESE IN A MATCHING METALWORK CASKET. Louis or Thédore Hagué (died 1891), also known as Caulin, produced numerous imitation Renaissance bindings, many of which were sold through Bernard Quaritch, until the deception was uncovered; for the full story, see Mirjam M. Foot, Carmen Blacker and Nicholas Poole-Wilson, "Collector, dealer and forger: a fragment of nineteenth-century binding history", in Eloquent Witnesses: Bookbindings and their history (2004), pp.264-281.


A small group of Hagué's pastiche bindings were produced with book boxes to store them in; there are mentions in the correspondence between Hagué and Quaritch of "coffrets" but most of them are now lost or simply unrecognised. Mirjam Foot's article "Binder, faker and artist", The Library, 7th Series 13 (2012), 133-146, describes more about these caskets and the recent fate of one of them.


An inventory of John Blacker's books, made by Quaritch who purchased his library after his death, listed fourteen book caskets, a "book sarcophagus" and a "shrine" from the time of François I (Foot, p.280). While many of Blacker's books were sold at Sotheby's on 11 November 1897, some of the books went elsewhere for sale, in both the UK and abroad; this book and its box were sold at Christie's on 16 December 1897, described as "ornamented in the Farnese style".


LITERATURE: ISTC id00027000


PROVENANCE: sold through Bernard Quaritch, probably between 1873 and 1890, to John Blacker (1822-1896); repurchased by Quaritch and consigned to Christie, Manson & Woods, sale, 16 December 1897, bought by Dr Charles Drage (1825-1922); by family descent


Charles Drage's son Geoffrey (1860-1955, writer and MP) had planned to write a book about Dante but it was never completed.