OVIDIUS Le Trasformationi di M. Lodovico Dolce.

Mortimer (Italian), 342 ; Brunet, II, 789 ; Sander, 5342 ; Essling, 246 ; Dyson Perrins cat., 103 (this copy) ; Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 95 ; Alden, 553/40 ; Shaaber (Pennsylvania), O133 ; not in the Barbier-Mueller colelction.

First edition of one of the most beautiful Italian illustrated books of the 16th century. The volume contains the first edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the Italian translation in verse (“ottava rima”) by Lodovico Dolce (Venice, 1508-1568), “one of the most prominent figures in the literary life of sixteenth-century Italy [and] a polygrapher in the most respectable sense of the word, a versatile genius who knew how to respond to the needs of the book industry which had developed in Venice” (Joseph Balsamo).

The work, dedicated by Dolce to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517-1586), also includes the privileges of Pope Julius III, Charles V, Cosimo de’ Medici, Henry III, the lordship of Venice, and the dukes of Ferrara and Mantua. The woodcut illustrations of this edition consists of an allegorical title, 94 figures occupying a third of the page (11 of which are repeated) and numerous historiated small letters. With the exception of eight blocks used in a Boccaccio printed by Giolito in 1552 and six other blocks intended to illustrate an edition of the Bible, all the vignettes were specially designed and engraved for this work. The last leaf (white verso) bears the colophon and the large printer’s device of Giolito, of whom this book is one of the undisputed masterpieces. Paul Oskar Kristeller (Kupferstich und Holzschnitt in vier Jahrhunderten, 1905, p. 281) has emphasized the novelty, quality and grace of these engravings, whose workmanship Ambroise Firmin Didot has also praised: “Most of them are of a learned and correct design and some are executed with a finish that hardly yields to the execution of the Lyon artists of the same time. The finials and the ornate letters are charming. It is one of the most beautiful books to come out of the presses of Venice” (see Didot, Catalogue raisonné, 1867, I, 417).

The book also contains a map showing the Americas. It is a woodcut printed on the verso of the sixth introductory leaf, above a sonnet composed by Arétin. This diagram showing the different winds, common to most early editions of Ovid, is presented here, for the first time, in the form of a globe (103 x 116 mm) inspired by Gastaldi and Macrobius. “The north and south parts of the hemisphere are separated by a latitudinal band and the words Zona Torrida Inhabitabile. The straits of Magellan are named and there are wind-cherubs bordering the map” (Shirley). The American continent is called Nueva Hispania. Lodovico Dolce’s Ovid was republished the same year in a revised version. On the different states of the text of the first edition, of which Lodovico Dolce, proofreader at Giolito’s, modified passages during the printing – only the copies on large paper seem to present the original text -, see the long note by Ruth Mortimer, op. cit.

An excellent copy, with several deckle edges. Some light foxing, small angular loss on leaf B1 and G5 outside the text.

Provenance: Charles William Dyson Perrins (1864-1958) and Sylvain S. Brunschwig, with their respective bookplates.