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HERMES TRISMEGISTUS. De potestate et sapientia Dei [Pimander]. Venice: Damianus de Mediolano de Gorgonzola, May 10, 1493.
Chancery 4° (203 x 145mm). 32 leaves, 29 lines. Type: 111R. Capital spaces with guide-letters, spaces for Greek. Modern half vellum (extremities lightly rubbed). Provenance: Libreria Antiquaria Mediolanum (bookseller’s ticket).
An early edition of a foundation text of the renaissance. The work was first published in 1471 in Treviso. So important were the works of Hermes Trismegistus to the Renaissance that when a manuscript of Pimander was found in Macedonia by Lionardo of Pistoia and brought to Cosimo de Medici at Florence (a 14th-century manuscript that survives at the Laurentiana), Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino to interrupt his work translating Plato in order first to translate Hermes. Ficino's translation of Pimander was completed in April 1463, and it is thus Ficino's first book. It circulated in numerous manuscript copies before being printed at Treviso in 1471. Ficino makes clear the primacy of Hermes in his preface: he was the 'fons et origo of a wisdom tradition which led in an unbroken chain to Plato' (Yates, p.15). As the first philosopher to contemplate things divine, Hermes was the founder of theology, and in his writing Christianity was foreseen. Hermetic philosophy informed a wide spectrum of Renaissance humanism, from Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to the Christian study of the cabala, and, owing to the alchemical hermetic works, magic and spirituality. Pimander was printed in more than 20 editions before 1641, and its hermetic influence has been traced in works as disparate as Newton's physics and the writings of Shakespeare, Sidney and Spenser. It was not until the 17th century that the Corpus Hermeticum was shown by Isaac Casaubon to have been written in the 2nd-3rd centuries CE in Egypt, probably by Egyptians with a Greek education, and not by a single priscus theologus. Thus, having exercised tremendous influence on western thought as ancient wisdom texts emanating from the Egyptian god Thoth (Hermes in Greek), they have continued significance for our understanding of gnosticism and neoplatonism, as well as remaining a key to Renaissance philosophy. HC 8461*; GW 12314; BMC V 543; BSB-Ink H-116; Goff H81.
Chancery 4° (203 x 145mm). 32 leaves, 29 lines. Type: 111R. Capital spaces with guide-letters, spaces for Greek. Modern half vellum (extremities lightly rubbed). Provenance: Libreria Antiquaria Mediolanum (bookseller’s ticket).
An early edition of a foundation text of the renaissance. The work was first published in 1471 in Treviso. So important were the works of Hermes Trismegistus to the Renaissance that when a manuscript of Pimander was found in Macedonia by Lionardo of Pistoia and brought to Cosimo de Medici at Florence (a 14th-century manuscript that survives at the Laurentiana), Cosimo ordered Marsilio Ficino to interrupt his work translating Plato in order first to translate Hermes. Ficino's translation of Pimander was completed in April 1463, and it is thus Ficino's first book. It circulated in numerous manuscript copies before being printed at Treviso in 1471. Ficino makes clear the primacy of Hermes in his preface: he was the 'fons et origo of a wisdom tradition which led in an unbroken chain to Plato' (Yates, p.15). As the first philosopher to contemplate things divine, Hermes was the founder of theology, and in his writing Christianity was foreseen. Hermetic philosophy informed a wide spectrum of Renaissance humanism, from Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, to the Christian study of the cabala, and, owing to the alchemical hermetic works, magic and spirituality. Pimander was printed in more than 20 editions before 1641, and its hermetic influence has been traced in works as disparate as Newton's physics and the writings of Shakespeare, Sidney and Spenser. It was not until the 17th century that the Corpus Hermeticum was shown by Isaac Casaubon to have been written in the 2nd-3rd centuries CE in Egypt, probably by Egyptians with a Greek education, and not by a single priscus theologus. Thus, having exercised tremendous influence on western thought as ancient wisdom texts emanating from the Egyptian god Thoth (Hermes in Greek), they have continued significance for our understanding of gnosticism and neoplatonism, as well as remaining a key to Renaissance philosophy. HC 8461*; GW 12314; BMC V 543; BSB-Ink H-116; Goff H81.
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