Prospero Bonarelli della Rovere

A first edition of the landmark neoclassical tragedy Il Solimano, the first documented performance using moveable scenes.

• Prospero Bonarelli della Rovere (Italian).
• Engravings by Jacques Callot.
• Florence, Italy: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1620. 
• Quarto.
• 162 pages.
• Includes 6 plates (engraved title page and 5 double-page etchings).
• Engraved title with Callot's name in bottom left.
• Bound in a later half parchment with marbled boards, gilt-ruled spine and red goatskin spine label.

First performed in Florence in 1619, Il Solimano was a turning point in modern European theater. Bonarelli not only rejected the chorus format of the long-established ancient Greek model, but made use of extravagant set design to tell his political-historical drama.

Bonarelli based the tragedy loosely on Suleiman the Magnificent, the famed Turkish sultan of the 16th century under whose rule the Ottoman Empire experienced a Golden Age of the arts. The story of a tyrant who puts to death his eldest son, Il Solimano culminates in the awe-inspiring destruction of the city by fire. Otto Benesch calls the moveable scenes created for the performance "the first in the history of theatre" (17) and notes that, despite the ostensibly Turkish setting, these sets depict early modern Florence. A mixture of neoclassicism and orientalism, Il Solimano captured the imagination of Europe, going through multiple editions over the century and inspiring further plays and operas.

This first edition remains highly sought for its Callot plates that not only depict the innovative set, but show many of the subtleties of style and technique that Callot pioneered under the patronage of the Medicis. His well-known mastery of stoppings out, for example, is evident in the final plate of the city in flames, where tendrils of smoke and individual bursts of fire cross the scene in a variety of depth, light and shade.