Vitruvius
M.L. Vitruvio Pollione di architettura dal vero esemplare latino nella volgar lingua tradotto: e con le figure a suoi luoghi con mírado ordine insignito.
Venice, Nicolo de Aristotele detto Zoppino 1535.
Full Description
8vo. (12)+110ff (signed AA6-BB6, A8-N8, O6, complete thus), (136) woodcut text ills. Mid 18th century marbled boards (an Italian binding), extremities worn, with gilt paper spine label. Eighteenth century ink shelfmarks on front free endpaper. Light stain to upper blank right-hand corner of first 12 ff and to last couple of leaves, and slight occasional foxing, small old repairs to corner of title leaf, but essentially a good, unrestored copy (a little loose in its binding).
A scarce illustrated edition of Vitruvius dating from the mid 1530s. Its origins go back to the 1520s, for the publication of the famous Como edition of Vitruvius in 1521 had revealed a widespread demand in Northern Italy for an illustrated edition of Vitruvius with a text in Italian rather than in Latin, and in 1524 the Venetian publishers Giovanni Antonio and Pietro de’ Nicolino da Sabbio issued a new edition of their own, combining an Italian language text derived from that of the Como edition and woodcut illustrations copied from those in the earlier Giocondo edition, issued with Latin text in 1511. The volume was edited for them by the scholar Francesco Lutio Durantino. The present edition is a reissue of that of 1524, with a newly designed title leaf within an elaborate woodcut border. Although the editions of 1524 and 1535 are less celebrated than other contemporary editions, they were widely read at the time – a copy of the 1524 edition annotated by the architect Antonio Sangallo the younger survives in an Italian institutional library – and they may well have been more readily available to working architects and ordinary readers than the editions of 1511 and 1521. Harvard Catalogue Italian Sixteenth Century Books 545 ; Fowler Cat 399 ; Berlin Cat 1804 ; Cicognara 705 ; BAL Cat 3521.