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Details
ALAMANNI, Luigi (1495-1556). Gyrone il Cortese. Paris: Regnault and Claude Chaudire, 1548.
4o (226 x 160 mm). Italic type, double column. Woodcut title border and printer's device, single large metalcut cribl initial. Ruled in red throughout. (Light foxing, some soiling and minor staining, front flyleaf pasted down at gutter of title-leaf slightly obscuring edge of woodcut border, old ownership inscription excised from title and patched, not affecting text, a4 and m3 torn, awkwardly repaired short tear to z3). Contemporary olive-brown morocco over pasteboard, apparently mottled, covers gold-tooled to a strapwork design built up entirely from straight lines and gouges, the central portion of the design filled with parallel diagonal gilt fillets, flat spine densely gilt with a single large repeated arabesque tool, board edges decorated with gilt fillets and small foliate tools, edges gilt, lacking two pairs of fore-edge ties, possibly later endpapers with watermark of 3 flowers within a shield = Briquet 1511 [Magdebourg 1582] (extremities rubbed, a few small scrapes to sides, old restorations to joints and spine with some touching up of the gold tooling, minor worming at tail of spine, upper inner hinge weak, lacking lower endband); modern cloth folding case. Provenance: "N[ume]RO VII" (early inscription on title, beneath excised inscription).
FIRST EDITION of this chivalric epic in ottava rima, adapted from the medieval French story Giron le courtois by the Florentine humanist Luigi Alamanni, who fled to France in 1522 following the discovery of an anti-Medicean conspiracy which he had led. After a brief return to Italy in 1527 Alamanni took up permanent residence in France, where he became the principal representative of Italian culture at the French court, enjoying the favor of Franois I and Henri II, to whom his roman de chevalerie is dedicated.
The vigorous and unusual binding is possibly Genevan. The one remaining endband, worked over a parchment strip, is characteristic of German bindings of this period. The flat spine of the binding implies that it was executed after 1550 or 1555, when the technique of recessed support sewing came into general use, and smooth spines became fashionable. According to Howard Nixon (Sixteenth-century gold-tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, p. 96), at first the positions of the cords tended to be marked by the tooled design on the spine, and overall spine designs, such as that on the present binding, did not come into fashion until the mid-1550s. Fairfax-Murray French 4.
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FIRST EDITION of this chivalric epic in ottava rima, adapted from the medieval French story Giron le courtois by the Florentine humanist Luigi Alamanni, who fled to France in 1522 following the discovery of an anti-Medicean conspiracy which he had led. After a brief return to Italy in 1527 Alamanni took up permanent residence in France, where he became the principal representative of Italian culture at the French court, enjoying the favor of Franois I and Henri II, to whom his roman de chevalerie is dedicated.
The vigorous and unusual binding is possibly Genevan. The one remaining endband, worked over a parchment strip, is characteristic of German bindings of this period. The flat spine of the binding implies that it was executed after 1550 or 1555, when the technique of recessed support sewing came into general use, and smooth spines became fashionable. According to Howard Nixon (Sixteenth-century gold-tooled Bookbindings in the Pierpont Morgan Library, p. 96), at first the positions of the cords tended to be marked by the tooled design on the spine, and overall spine designs, such as that on the present binding, did not come into fashion until the mid-1550s. Fairfax-Murray French 4.