Bidspirit auction | Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri - Dante Alighieri - The Comedy, 1472. Mantua, Georgius de Augusta and Paulus de Butzbach, per Columbinus Veronensis, 1472. In 2°. The edition was printed in the same year as the princeps of the Comedy (Foligno, 1472) but for layout, quality of type and philological reliability it is the most important of the three editions of 1472. The volume is printed in two columns of 41 lines, without numbering, signatures and references, and is printed in Roman characters R106. Our copy begins with a magnificent illuminated initial in red and blue, which It also repeats at the beginning of Purgatory and Paradise. It does not contain the Capitulo by Colombino Veronese, which is absent in most of the known copies. There are some contemporary annotations in Latin , 8 in total, of varying length. This copy is to be considered among the most exceptional among those known, first of all for its dimensions, 319 x 230 mm. , much larger than those of the copy in the British Library , the Trivulziana and the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris. The state of conservation of the copy is uniformly perfect, the only one The only serious problem is the lack of four leaves, replaced with facsimiles on old paper, skillfully executed on the Trivulziana copy, and one restored leaf: leaves 78, 83, 86, 89, and 90. The latter (the colophon leaf) has been restored by integrating the missing section, namely the left column, while the one bearing the colophon is intact and in excellent condition. These interventions on the copy were probably carried out around the 1950s. Modern full leather binding.