1534 ALDINE SANNAZARO Italian RENAISSANCE POETRY Sonnets PETRARCA style NAPLES

Description

[Early Printing - Aldine Press] [Renaissance Vernacular Literature - Italian - Poetry]
Printed in Venice by the heirs of Aldo Manuzio and Andrea Asolano, July 1534.
Scarce 1st Aldine edition of this lovely collection of Italian poems by Jacopo Sannazaro, an Italian Renaissance humanist poet from Naples.
First printed (posthumously) in 1530 Naples and Rome, 1530.
Although composed in early as 1480s, Sannazaro's
Rime
(Rhymes) was "not published in his own lifetime, [they] consist of about a hundred sonnets and canzoni, competently done in the Petrarchan mode. Naturally, complaints of unrewarded love prevail, but a good many sonnets are directed to the praise of friends or to reflections on general subjects, such as morality and and fortune.” (P.Bondanella, et al (ed.), Cassell Dictionary of the Italian Literature, p.524)
Sannazaro’s Rime "is a typical fifteenth-century book of poems, modeled on Petrarch’s
Canzoniere
and on Giusto de Conti’s
La Bella Mano
(1472). It is divided into two sections, which include respectively 32 and 69 poems (sonnets, canzoni, sestine, madrigals, and three
capitoli
in
terza rima
). The first section combines Petrarchan metrical cliches with celebrative themes, while the second exhibits typical fifteenth-century motifs (descriptions of women, transience of beauty and glory), as well as others that belong to Sannazaro’s mature poetics: dreams, death, visions of ravines, and religious meditation.
This second section attests to a creative turning point. In Rime 33, for example, Sannazaro declares his decision to change his life and literary style, and he asks the Muses to lead him back to the pastoral world, thus searching for a new audience beyond the Court and the Academy. This confirms what the author writes in the preface to the collection, which is dedicated to Cassandra Marchese, a Neapolitan noble lady, with whom he maintained a close relationship over many years. Both the lyrical declaration and the preface announce Sannazaro’s definitive switch to Neo-Latin poetry.” (G. Marrone,
Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies
, p.1675)
Jacopo Sannazaro (1458 - 1530) was a prominent Italian Renaissance poet whose work both in Latin and Italian was extremely fashionable in its own time. The court poet of King Ferdinand I of Naples, Sannazaro was a member and then leader of Pontano's humanist academy from the 1480s on. He wrote easily in Latin, in Italian and in Neapolitan, but is best remembered for his humanist classic Arcadia, a masterwork that illustrated the possibilities of poetical prose in Italian. Sannazaro's elegant style was the inspiration for much courtly literature of the 16th century, including Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.
Sannazaro was born in 1458 at Naples of a noble family of the Lomellina, that claimed to derive its name from a seat in Lombard territory, at San Nazaro near Pavia. His father died ca 1462, during the boyhood of Jacopo, who was brought up at Nocera Inferiore and at San Cipriano Piacentino, whose rural atmosphere colored his poetry. In 1483-85 he campaigned twice with Alfonso against papal forces near Rome.
In the Accademia Pontaniana that collected around Giovanni Pontano, he took the classicizing nom de plume of Actius Syncerus. His withdrawal from Naples as a young man, sometimes treated as biographical, is apparently a purely literary trope. He speedily achieved fame as a poet and a place as a courtier. Following the death of his major patron, Alfonso (1495), in 1499 he received his villa "Mergellina" near Naples from Frederick IV, but when Frederick capitulated to France and Aragon, he followed him into exile in France in 1501, whence he returned to Mergellina after Frederick's death at Tours (1504). The later years of the poet seem to have been spent at Naples. In 1525 he succeeded the humanist Pietro Summonte as head of the Pontanian academy.
Sannazaro's Arcadia, a pastoral poem written around 1480, when Sannazaro was only 22 years old. It is a work in mingled verse and prose, in which he described the pastoral life according to the traditions of the ancients. This work enjoyed a great success; it was widely translated and imitated, and in the sixteenth century had about sixty editions. The "Arcadia" gave rise to the pastoral style of writing much cultivated in Italy and elsewhere. It greatly influenced the European literature of the 16th and 17th centuries (e.g., Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Marguerite de Navarre, Jorge de Montemayor, and John Milton).
With the Arcadia behind him, Sannazaro concentrated on Latin works of classical inspiration. upon which his poetical reputation was formerly founded: the
Ecologiae piscatoriae
, bucolic verses on themes connected with the Bay of Naples and the lives of fishermen; three books of elegies, and three books of epigrams. containing interesting details concerning the life of the poet and contemporaries, his mistresses, Carmosina, Bonifacia, and Cassandra, and which are the best evidences of his sentiments;
Salices
("Willows"), dealing with the theme of a metamorphosis; the religious poem
De Morte Christi Lamentatio
["Lament on the Death of Christ"], and especially the
De partu Virginis
("on the virgin birth"), a sacred poem celebrating the birth of Christ and often described as his version of Mary's Magnificat.
Sannazaro's portrait by Titian, painted ca. 1515, is in the British Royal Collection.
Bibliographical references:
Renouard 112-6; Adams S-338; Ahmanson-Murphy 273.
Physical description:
Octavo; text block measures 150 mm x 103 mm;
bound in 18th-century (or perhaps earlier?) Italian ornamental wrappers (amazingly well preserved for this type of an ephemeral, fragile binding, intended to be only temporary)
.
Foliation: 48, [4] leaves (forming 104 pages); signatures: A-F
8
G
4
.
COMPLETE!
Woodcut Aldine anchor-and-dolphin printer’s mark on title-page and on verso of the final leaf (G
4
v).
Printed in Aldine italic type.
Includes Sannazaro’s leer of dedication to Cassandra Marchesa
(on verso of title). At the end of the book is a table of contents (G
1
r-
3
r), register and colophon (G
3
r, verso blank) and Aldine device (G
4
v, recto blank)
Condition:
Very Good antiquarian condition. Complete. The wrappers slightly soiled and a bit faded in places, with some wear to corners, and light chipping to bottom of spine. Internally with occasional light soiling (mostly marginal), several leaves at the end with a bit of wear to fore-corners; final quire with very light marginal water-stain to the (blank) inner bottom corner. Some light scattered spotting. In all a very pleasing, genuine, unsophisticated example, clean, solid, and remarkably well preserved in its (rather early) ephemeral and fragile binding, intended to be interim and only temporary.
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