Dello scherno de gli dei. Poema Piacevole con la Filide Civettina e Col' Batino..
Florence: Apresso I. Giunti, 1618. First edition of Bracciolini’s (1566-1645) best known work. Woodcut device on title, each of fourteen cantos with decorative woodcut capital. Each page of text within an ornamental type border. One inch chip at head of spine, two contemporary ownership signatures in blank portions of title-page. A good copy. Contemporary limp vellum, soiled, title in manuscript on spine. Quarto. [16], 252 [i.e. 236], [2] pp. Item #13412
“The work immediately gave rise to a polemic with Tassoni over whether he or Bracciolini first invented the mock-heroic genre in Italian…Bracciolini’s work, whose purpose was to mock pagan deities and their use in Italian literature, centres on Venus’s revenge against her husband Vulcan, who caught her in adultery with Mars. When all the gods are expelled from heaven, they descend to earth and are slaughtered by humankind, led by Prometheus…this work relies on ‘parody and the grotesque, and shows some interesting Tuscan linguistic touches” (Oxford Companion to Literature in Italian).
Price: $1,250.00