La Gerusalemme Liberata di Torquato Tasso
THE RAREST BODONI TASSO
No. 81 of 100 AD PERSONAM COPIES,
PRINTED FOR BODONI’S COLLABORATOR GAETANO ZILIANI
Two volumes. Parma: Bodoni, 1794. First edition, limited; no. 81 of 100 ad personam copies, of a total limitation of 130.
Folio in 4s (18 ¼” x 12 1/8”, 462mm x 308mm).
Vol. I: π1 2π2 *4 3π2 4π1 1-414 422 [$2 signed; 232 mis-signed “21.”]. 176 leaves, pp. [20] (limitation, blank, title, blank, dedication, blank, 8pp. dedicatory verse, 3pp. to the reader, blank, fly-title, blank), 1 2-331, blank.
Vol. II. π2(π1+χπ1; π1 blank) 1-414 426 (426 blank) [$2 signed]. 173 leaves, pp. [6] (2 blanks, limitation, blank, title, blank), 1 2-337, [3] (3 blanks).
Bound in contemporary marbled boards. On the spine, author, title (“Gerusaleme”) and number manuscript to a paper label. All edges of the text-block un-trimmed.
Worn at the extremities, especially at the fore-corners. Covers rubbed. Joints of vol. I strengthened with modern cloth tape. Vol. II shaken, with both joints splitting. Scattered foxing, mostly quite mild. A splendid copy in boards with full margins.
Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) is in some ways the prototype of the tortured poet; plagued by mental illness in his later life, he died just a few days before he was to be crowned king of poets by Pope Clement VIII. Son of a poet attached to the sophisticated court of Urbino, Tasso’s magnum opus was the Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Freed, viz. from Islamic rule), a tale of the first crusade led by Godefroy de Bouillon (i.e., Boulogne-sur-Mer) in the final years of the XIc (1096–1099). The poem reveals a great attention to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso of 1516, albeit with a much greater emphasis on the romances of Tancredi; both draw on the paradigm of the Odyssey: a wandering hero falling in and out of love and other misadventures.
Gerusalemme Liberata was first published in 1581, and so its republication some two centuries later requires explanation. The proximate cause may be Goethe’s 1790 play Torquato Tasso, part of a larger European reappraisal of the Romantic (i.e., in the broader context of XVIIIc Romanticism) figure. (Indeed, Lord Byron would praise Tasso in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (canto IV) and go on to write The Lament of Tasso 1815–1817.) The revolutions and turmoil throughout Europe touched Italy, and so Tasso served as a touchstone for Italian identity — and as nostalgia for a Europe united against a common enemy rather than overcome with internecine struggle.
No publisher was better placed to straddle this time of European shifts than Giambattista Bodoni (i.e., Giovanni Battista, 1740–1813). Just as Tasso modelled himself on Ariosto, so did Bodoni on Baskerville and Fournier. He was a type-designer, typographer, editor, publisher — and the sort of celebrity that drew admiration throughout the Western world (it is often asserted that Benjamin Franklin wrote him a “fan letter,” but where is it?). Indeed, he came to be sought-after by crowned heads including the King Charles IV of Spain (to whom the present work is dedicated) and Napoleon.
Bodoni — after whom many type-faces are named — worked with Firmin Didot in Paris to develop a new mode of humanistic letterpress, one with strong distinctions between thick and thin parts of individual characters, generally called “Modern.” To these distinct letter-forms is added a Baskervillish mise-en-page: a great deal of white space, an absence of ornament, a rhythm of text-shapes based on the size and boldness of the characters.
The first edition of Bodoni’s Gerusalemme Liberata (a second edition was published in 1807) is among the rarest and most sought of his publications — partly for the beauty of the work and partly for the scarcity of its production. On the former the reader must decide, but the latter is beyond dispute. The work was limited to 130 examples, and 100 examples were printed specifically for individual subscribers — “ad personam.” Many have been trimmed and bound, and so to find the work in its original gaily-marbled boards and with its deckled edges is rarer still.
“Ad personam” copies are truly unique; the initial blank has been replaced by a printed sheet bearing the number (81) and the name of the subscriber (Don Gaetano Ziliani, Parmigiano) for whom it was intended; that is, the particular leaf from the Bodoni press exists in these volumes only. Ziliani was no mere subscriber; he was a close friend of Bodoni’s, a paper-maker (though not for the present volume, which bears the water-mark PB) and, crucially, a banker of sorts to him. Ziliani facilitated payments and the transfer of funds between Parma and Rome, which was essential to the press. Ziliani was eventually one of three executors of Bodoni’s will.
Acquired at Sotheby’s Milan 4 October 2022, lot 226.
Brooks, 563.
Item #JLR0509
Price: $10,600