Calderini, Domizio:

Commentarii in Martialem.

      Publisher: [colophon: Venetiis [Venice] arte & ingenio Jacobi de Rubeis] 1474 idibus Septembris [i.e. 13 September] Folio, 171 unnumbered leaves (lacking final blank). With initial blank present. Roman type, 50 lines per page. Good margins. Contemporary boards, with titles inked on front and back covers in contemporary or early hands, spine replaced in vellum in 17th or 18th centuries. Internally, despite some soiling and a few wormholes towards beginning and end, generally in very good condition; externally, boards with some worming and loss, and old furniture removed, and with some tears, and small loss at head, to spine. Provenance: inscription at top of 2nd fol. recto of Magr. Ioannes de Liminio; below colophon, of Ant.o ?Guadello; the odd contemporary or early marginalium, and numbering of books at top of page; 19th-cent. armorial bookplate of Rev. J. Williams, M.A., Bryntirion. One of three editions from the first year of printing (the first Rome, 22 March, and the other, also Venice, without a day of issue), of this significant book in Renaissance humanism, a commentary on the epigrams of the 1st-cent. Roman poet Martial. This edition is often found bound with a c.1475 edition of Calderini's 'Commentarii in Ovidii Ibin' (Goff C41). Calderini (c.1444-1478), born near Verona but educated and employed in Rome, was "one of a new generation of humanists [...] [who] formed the crest of the mid-[15th] century 'nouvelle vague'" (Grafton). As literature professors, they chose line-by-line commentaries such as this to "best demonstrate their independence from the work of their immediate predecessors, while at the same time winning their colleagues' attention and serving the needs of their students" (id.). Their chosen authors were often Latin, particularly satirical poets (such as Martial). It was a very competitive world and "Calderini falsified his notes on Martial to refute a justified attack by Perotti" (id) However, some of Calderini's notes in this work, for example, readings of words and phrases for two-horned rhinocoruses and camels, do stand up against successors' criticisms. With dedications to Francesco Lodovico Gonzaga and Lorenzo de' Medici.One of four known books from the second year that this printer operated, there being one extant publication from 1473. Jacobus de Rubeis/Rubeus belonged to a notable family of craftsmen from Chablis. He may well have worked in Venice for his fellow-Frenchman Nicolas Jenson, who remembered him and his wife in his will, and "several of his types are very close copies of Jensonian models" (cf. BMC). He removed to Pinerolo near Turin in 1478/9, possibly on account of plague. Bodleian XV-Century Books, C-021. Goff C38. GW 5889. BMC V 213 (copy described bound with Goff C41); see also V xiv-xv for notes on Rubeus. See Anthony Grafton, 'Joseph Scaliger' (2 vols. Oxford 1983) I, 15, 20, 41-2.