PLUTARCHUS.

Vitae parallelae.

      Plutarch in the unsurpassed 1478 Jenson edition. Illuminated copy of Petrus De Ginori in a fine contemporary Italian binding Venice, Nicolas Jenson, 1478, 2 January. 2 vols. in one. Folio. Beautiful contemporary blind tooled brown calf over wooden boards; fillets, rolls and loose stamps; an octangular space in the center with two ornaments composed of four demi-circles of six lines, surrounded by a pattern of very tiny stamps; spine in six compartments tooled in a lozenge-shaped pattern; brass corner- and centerpieces; four clasps and catches: two at the fore edge and one at the top and lower edge. First text-page lavishly illuminated: the 12-lines initial (Q) in gold decorated with a exquisite freely painted spray of coloured flowers in blue, red, pink and yellow, green leaves and tiny gold rayed discs in a North Italian (Florentine?) style, extending in the left and top margins; a similar spray in the right margin surrounds a monogram 'PB' and a coat of arms: a blue field with a gold bar with three gold stars, in a green wreath in the lower margin.Very wide margins (405 x 20mm.); printed in the famous Jenson roman (Type 115 (111)R); capital spaces with guide letters. Collation: Vol. 1 : a(10), b(12), c-m(10), n(8), o-x(10), y-z(8), &(8) (= 234 leaves, including the first blank and the often lacking blank f. b7); one extra blank leaf; vol. 2: A-E(10), F-N(alt. 8/10), oo-pp(8), Q-Y(10), Z(8), &&(10) (= 226 leaves). Parchment double-leaves are bound in at the beginning and the end of the book-bloc, one of the leaves pasted to the boards. Splendid and in many respects best and most important edition of the Lives by Plutarch, published by the famous printer, publisher and type-designer Nicolas Jenson. It is the third edition of this work, only preceded by the edtio princeps, edited by Johannes Antonius Campanus, printed in 1470-71 at Rome by Ulrich Hahn, and the Strassbourg edition by the R-printer (=Adolph Rusch), after 1471 (the edition by Sweynheym and Pannartz, Rome 1473 - Hain 13126 - is a bibliographical ghost).It is a pity that we know so little of the genesis of what instantly became a much prized and widely read edition, recommended as much by its popular subject matter as by its exceptional typography, offering content and presentation in perfect harmony. The edition is based on the edition by Campanus, but a great deal of further editorial work had been needed, as Jenson acknowledged in a colophon, stating that the Lives had been 'emended with anxious care'. The Latin translations are by Johannes Tortellinus, Lapus Biragus, Donatus Acciaiuolus, Antonius Pacinus, Guarinus Veronensis, Leonardus Brunus, Franciscus Barbarus, Leonardus Justinianus, Alamannus Rinuccinus and Jacobus Angelus de Scarperia. Added were the Vitae of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus and Charlemagne by Donatus Acciaiuolus; of Titus Pomponius Atticus by Cornelius Nepos; of Cicero and Aristotle by Leonardus Brunus; and of Plato by Guarinus Veronensis; the translation by Perigrinus Attius of the pseudo Plutarch Vita of Homer; the translation by Guarinus Veronensis of the Vita of Euagoras by Isocrates; the translation by Baptista Guarinus of the Vita of Agesilaos by Xenophon, and the Breviarium rerum gestarum populi Romani by Festus. Jenson substituted a version of the Lives of Theseus and Romulus by Lapo da Castiglionchio for the one by Filelfo which Campanus had used, deleted the non-Plutarchus Lives of Homer and Virgil from the end of the selection, and re-issued the remainder of the collection. Subsequent editions of the Vitae followed his. Such a procedure of changing and adding material in such a way as to give his version of the text a look of its own and to offer the reader something extra for his money, is typical for Jenson during the seventies of the century.Nicolas Jenson († 1480) was undoubtedly the greatest of the first generation of Venetian printers. Born ca. 1440 near Tours he may have been sent to Mainz in 1458 by King Charles VII to learn the secrets of the new trade of printing, introduced there by Gutenberg. He left Mainz probably in 1462. Until 1470 when he emerged as a first-rate printer in Venice, nothing is known about him. Unlike Aldus Manutius, who started printing in Venice in the later 80s, Jenson was a businessman and technocrat, not so much a humanist and scholar. Jenson's achievements were earlier than Aldus', slightly different, but in a sense they have had an even further-reaching importance, especially because of the grandeur and perfect lay-out of his Latin and Greek classics, and certainly also because of his letter forms which were justly admired for their beauty and legibility. In his letter designs he has transposed for the first time Carolingian script forms into a lower-case alphabet that would match the roman inscriptional capital letters already employed for the upper case alphabet. This was an artistical and technical achievement of the first magnitude and of lasting importance to the shape and appearance of our basic information medium in the Western civilisation: the roman letter forms. Jenson was already admired and respected by his contemporaries not only as a fine printer of classics, canon law and liturgical material, but also for his ability to render letter forms in distinctly 'typographic' characters that remain a source of inspiration for designers to this day. Harry Carter once observed after counting some thirty roman founts based on Janson's design: 'there was little left for makers of roman type but to copy Jenson'. Plutarch's popularity and importance rest primarily on these Vitae (or Parallel Lives) - composed in Greek ca 100-120 AD -, which were designed to encourage mutual respect between Greeks and Romans. The lives are presented in pairs, for example: Theseus - Romulus; Demosthenes - Cicero; Alexander the Great - Caesar, etc. In all 22 pairs survive and four single biographies of Aratus, Artaxerxes, and the Roman emperors Otho and Galba. By exhibiting noble deeds and characters, they were also to provide patterns of good behavior and moral and ethical values. Plutarch's later influence has been profound, but his reputation faded in the Latin West during the Middle Ages, only to be re-introduced in Renaissance Italy by Byzantine scholars in the 15th century. Italian humanists had translated Plutarch's work into Latin long before the Greek editio princeps was published at Florence in 1517, re-published by Aldus in 1519. Especially through its translations into Latin (of which the present 1478 Jenson edition is the best incunable-edition), as well as in the vernacular (the famous French translation by Jacques Amyot in 1559, and the English translation by Sir Thomas North in 1579) the Lives could gain an enormous impact on Western civilisation by providing later biographers and literary authors an outstanding model. It is very well known for example that authors like Montagne, Corneille, Racine, Rouseau and Schiller heavily drew upon the Lives. This was certainly also the case with Shakespeare for whom the Lives were the main source for his Roman plays. Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Anthony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens, all come, often literally, from the Lives (G. Highet, The Classical Tradition, Oxford 1967. p. 210-14). They have functioned also to a great extent as a model for later rulers like the French King Henry IV, Frederik II of Prussia and even Napoleon.Provenance: The copy was first owned by Petrus de Ginoris (Pietro Ginori (de Riparbello)), who had the copy also illuminated. Not only there is the coat of arms of the Ginori family from Florence in the lower margin of the first text-page: a blue field with a gold bar with three gold stars (Rietstap, G (Plate L)), but there is also his embellished monogram ('PB') in the right margin. That this monogram PB is in fact the monogram of Petrus de Ginoris is proved by the ownership's entry on the recto of the free parchment flyleaf at the beginning: above his name 'Petri Gini de Ginoris' there is the same mongram 'PB'. The only problem is that this entry is dated 'cccco lxxii' which is impossible of course. Probably this is a mistake for 1482 (cccc lxxxii). Magnificent copy of this important edition with beautifully illuminated first page; very wide margins. Probably it was the original owner Petrus de Ginoris who wrote a table of contents on the recto of the first blank leaf.- (Few wormholes and insignificant staines in the margins; binding recently skillfully restored: rebacked with the remaining original fragments of the back pasted on; a restoration report is available). Hain-Copinger *13127; Goff P 832; Pol. 3212; BMC V, p. 178; Pell-Pol. 9387; Proctor 4113; BNCI P 491; IGI 7922; BSB-Ink, P 626; IDL 3749; Sardini, Nicolao Jenson, 1478 (i, ii); Flodr, Incun. Classicorum, p. 250; Lowry, Nicolas Jenson, pp. 122-3.