Dante Alighieri/Niccolò Tommaseo/Federico Faruffini...

A very RARE and beautiful edition of Dante's masterpiece!!!! "Commedia di Dante Allighieri con ragionamenti e note di Niccolò Tommaseo"... Milan, Francesco Pagnoni, 1865. 3 folio volumes (33.5 cm x 24 cm). Pages CXIX, 622, (1); 731, (2); 731, 1 c.b. With a portrait of Dante in the frontispiece of the 1st volume and 54 splendid plates (including 9 plates with 4 engravings each, often missing from the original to most copies) in stippled aquatint on laid paper in a Neoclassical taste executed by Giuseppe Gandini on drawings by painters Federico Faruffini and Carlo Barbieri, with a facing guard sheet containing the corresponding terza rima. Text in double columns, framed by a double xilographic border. Beautiful half-leather binding in very good condition. Inside the work, pages are clean, illustrations complete, full-page ones protected by browning tissue guards—tissue with some signs of wear at the margins—accompanied by a description of the image. Important first edition of this Comedy, published on the occasion of the sixth centenary of Dante's birth, with the commentary by the Dalmatian linguist and writer Niccolò Tommaseo, one of the monuments of Dante exegesis of the nineteenth century, to whom the exile in Paris, where he had fled to escape persecutions by the Austrian government, was devoted from the early years; perhaps the major contribution after Francesco S. De Sanctis's writings. The work is enriched with various writings concerning the Dante poem, many of which are unpublished. Preceding the Comedy are Dante's life and some discourses about him; furthermore in the preface the “Proem,” the “Century of Dante,” the “Life of Dante,” “Love of Dante,” “Rimes,” “Dante and Petrarch,” and other discourses prefixed to the poem; the “Discourses added to each canto of the Inferno”; finally the “Writings concerning the poem of Dante.” The “Discourses added” are repeated also in the other two volumes. At the end of Purgatorio there are also the “Writings published and unpublished by Niccolò Tommaseo concerning the poem of Dante.” At the end of the third volume are then added various writings by Tommaseo on the Comedy, published and unpublished. Rarissimo!!!!

Estimate:£151.56

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