first edition
1561 · Venice
by PIGNA, Giovanni Battista (1529-1575)
4to (210x153 mm). 105, [19] pp. Collation: A-M4 N6 *4 **4. Complete with l. N6, a blank. Roman and italic type. Woodcut printer's device on the title page, a different device on l. N5v. Woodcut animated initials, head- and tailpieces. Leaf L4v within woodcut architectural border. Late 19th-century brown cloth, spine with title in gilt lettering (slightly worn). Repaired worming to the lower inner margin throughout the volume (more strongly at the center of the volume) only occasionally slightly affecting the text, upper and lower margin a bit short, all in all a very good copy printed on blue paper from the library of Count Henry Chandon de Briailles (1898-1937; his bookplate on the recto of the front flyleaf).
First and only edition, dedicated by Pigna to Alfonso II d'Este (Ferrara, 15 August 1561), of this treatise on the heroic poem divided into three parts, followed by a poem of 49 ottava rima stanzas printed at the end of the volume, which narrates the true events of the duke's fall from his horse during a tournament.
"Gli heroici is a short treatise meant to introduce and explain Pigna's own heroic poem on the fall of Alfonso da Este in a tournament; the poem follows in the same volume. His choice of the subject was dictated, he says, by the fact that it contained in their proper form the 'seven circumstances of all civil operations': a person, an action, relationship to great persons, an instrument, a place and occasion, a mode for the action, and an end (pp. 9-10). As a heroic poem, or an epic, this work will possess some qualities common to all poetry, some features peculiar to the epic, and some characteristics which it will share with the related form of tragedy. So for the most part the statement that it contains 'one single action of one illustrious person' is general in its application, except that the 'illustrious' relates it specifically to tragedy and the epic (p. 11) […] In Pigna's poem, the true event is the fall of Alfonso from his horse; the verisimilar consequence is that the guardian angels, headed by Mars, should have interceded with God for his life. This latter action constitutes the 'imitation'. It will be noted that the action as described contains elements both of tragedy and of the epic: first, there is mutation of fortune which relates it to tragedy; second, there is a perfecting of the actual events which relate them to the epic. The emotional effects are equally mixed: pity and terror accompanied by the desire for honor (on the part of common men) and the desire for magnanimity (on the part of the great) […] Finally, the action combines elements of the active and contemplative lives; the active life is more proper to illustrious persons, the other to private citizens. Thus Pigna's poem leans more towards the active, which is both heroic and tragic (pp. 55-66) […] It is clear from what Pigna says in the three books of Gli heroici that theory has been made to serve two purposes, to provide the basis of the poem itself and to justify, after the fact, certain features of that same poem […]" (B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago, 1961, I, pp. 469-471).
"Nel 1561 [Pigna] pubblicò un'edizione dell'Ars poetica di Orazio (Venezia, V. Valgrisi), frutto degli intensi studi giovanili, e un trattato in tre libri dedicato ad Alfonso II, Gli heroici (Venezia, G. Giolito, 1561) intesi idealmente a saldare le riflessioni sul poema cavalleresco con il nuovo interesse per una nuova 'poesia heroica', fondata su un fatto vero, cioè storico, nel quale interviene però il verosimile, sotto forma di trascendente o soprannaturale. La nuova idea di poesia è esemplificata dal poemetto celebrativo in 50 stanze intitolato L'heroico – 'uno schizzo della vita heroica' (Gli heroici, p. 15) – intorno al quale si struttura il trattato. Il poemetto ha per soggetto la 'horribile caduta' del principe Alfonso durante una giostra a Blois nel 1556: 'il vero fu che il Principe cadesse a morte et non morisse […] et il verisimile è che gli Angeli custodi della sua vita incontinente si movessero, et che Marte principale tra essi li conducesse dinanzi a Dio, et parlasse per salute di esso Signore in modo tale che gli impetrasse la vita' (ibid., p. 12)" (S. Ritrovato, Nicolucci, Giovan Battista, in: "Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani", vol. 78, 2013, s.v.).
Bongi states that there are copies of the Heroici printed by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari on large paper and on blue paper, one of which was in the hands of "cav. Andrea Tessier di Venezia". The reference is to the library of the Venetian cavaliere Andrea Tessier (d. 1896), which was sold in Munich in 1900 by Jacques Rosenthal, and which contained a copy "tiré sur papier bleu" (Bibliothek Tessier. Katalog eins grossen Theils der Bibliotheken des verstorbenen Chevalier Andrea Tessier und des Marchese de***, lot 534). This copy may have been purchased by Count Raoul Chandon de Briailles and subsequently inherited by his son Henry, whose ex-libris is pasted on the flyleaf of the copy offered here. A blue-paper copy of Pigna's work was also sold in London in 1783, at the sale of the distinguished library collected by Thomas Croft: the catalogue Bibliotheca Croftsiana lists the entry "Pigna (Gio. Batt.) gli Heroici 4° perg. Vineg. per Gab. Giolito 1561. printed upon blue paper".
"In the second half of 1514, Aldine copies printed on blue paper and unusually large white paper (the so-called carta grande or reale) suddenly appeared on the market. The earliest known Aldine books on blue paper were part of the Scriptores rei rusticae in quarto dated May 1514 […] Giolito ostensibly followed Aldus's line some thirty years after the latter's death. By this time printing on parchment had probably become too expensive to deal with, even for a printer with ambitions and means such as Giolito. Among the handful of copies he did issue on parchment, two are from the first appearance of his best seller, a lavishly illustrated edition of Ariosto's Orlando furioso dated 1542. From the following year onwards,Giolito usually turned to blue paper, printing at least two copies the Furioso edition of 1543 and three for that of 1544. Such pattern was kept for many other of his publications for over two decades, until 1568. While it is possible that a handful of blue paper copies were presented to patrons, authors and prominent editors, the scale, frequency and consistency of most of these items suggest that they could only be meant for profit. This holds especially true for those which were part of the editions he routinely reprinted, such as Ariosto and Petrarch. Giolito must have gotten so used to producing a small part of his print-run in blue paper that he kept a considerable amount of this material in stock, roughly 1.2% of the whole value of his supply of white paper, as we learn from the firm's inventory dated 1550.As soon as we try to turn these data into an estimate of copies, something does not add up. When we apply the same ratio for all his output in the period 1543-1568 (790 editions) and even if we assume, overcautiously, that the two papers had the same unit cost and that the average print-run for each edition was around one thousand copies, Giolito would suddenly be credited with producing over nine thousand copies on blue paper. This is clearly too high a figure even for him, but it shows well to which extent he was able to improve and capitalised on what Aldus had started and ostensibly started trading in blue paper. Further hints that he also had a grip on the production chain of blue paper can be found in the same inventory: Giolito amassed an amount of the main dyer - woad -worth as much as 635.3 ducats, close to the value of his house furniture plus the printing machinery (661.7 ducats) and nearly three times the value of the rags he cared to stock (241.6 ducats)" (P. Sachet, In between Aldus and Giolito: Venetian imprints on blue paper (1514-1543), in: "Venice in blue", A. McCarthy, L. Moretti & P. Sachet, eds., Florence, 2024, pp. 133-134).
Giovanni Battista Nicolucci called Il Pigna was born in Ferrara, where he began his studies with Lilio Gregorio Giraldi and Battista Guarini. At the age of twenty he became a teacher at the 'Studio' in Ferrara and later secretary, chancellor and historiographer to Alfonso II d'Este. He was the author of Il duello (1554), the Romanzi (1554), a treatise on honour and the qualities of a gentleman, a history of the house of Este (1570), and an important treatise on stagecraft, Il Principe (1561), dedicated to duke Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, but originally written for Alfonso d'Este when he was a young prince (cf. R. Baldi, Giovan Battista Pigna: uno scrittore politico del Cinquecento, Genoa, 1983, passim).
Adams, P-1208; S. Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stampatore in Venezia, Rome, 1895, II, p. 121; A. Nuovo-Ch. Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nell'Italia del XVI secolo, Genève, 2005, p. 423; Edit 16, CNCE26327; Weinberg, op. cit., II, p. 1141. (Inventory #: 211)
First and only edition, dedicated by Pigna to Alfonso II d'Este (Ferrara, 15 August 1561), of this treatise on the heroic poem divided into three parts, followed by a poem of 49 ottava rima stanzas printed at the end of the volume, which narrates the true events of the duke's fall from his horse during a tournament.
"Gli heroici is a short treatise meant to introduce and explain Pigna's own heroic poem on the fall of Alfonso da Este in a tournament; the poem follows in the same volume. His choice of the subject was dictated, he says, by the fact that it contained in their proper form the 'seven circumstances of all civil operations': a person, an action, relationship to great persons, an instrument, a place and occasion, a mode for the action, and an end (pp. 9-10). As a heroic poem, or an epic, this work will possess some qualities common to all poetry, some features peculiar to the epic, and some characteristics which it will share with the related form of tragedy. So for the most part the statement that it contains 'one single action of one illustrious person' is general in its application, except that the 'illustrious' relates it specifically to tragedy and the epic (p. 11) […] In Pigna's poem, the true event is the fall of Alfonso from his horse; the verisimilar consequence is that the guardian angels, headed by Mars, should have interceded with God for his life. This latter action constitutes the 'imitation'. It will be noted that the action as described contains elements both of tragedy and of the epic: first, there is mutation of fortune which relates it to tragedy; second, there is a perfecting of the actual events which relate them to the epic. The emotional effects are equally mixed: pity and terror accompanied by the desire for honor (on the part of common men) and the desire for magnanimity (on the part of the great) […] Finally, the action combines elements of the active and contemplative lives; the active life is more proper to illustrious persons, the other to private citizens. Thus Pigna's poem leans more towards the active, which is both heroic and tragic (pp. 55-66) […] It is clear from what Pigna says in the three books of Gli heroici that theory has been made to serve two purposes, to provide the basis of the poem itself and to justify, after the fact, certain features of that same poem […]" (B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago, 1961, I, pp. 469-471).
"Nel 1561 [Pigna] pubblicò un'edizione dell'Ars poetica di Orazio (Venezia, V. Valgrisi), frutto degli intensi studi giovanili, e un trattato in tre libri dedicato ad Alfonso II, Gli heroici (Venezia, G. Giolito, 1561) intesi idealmente a saldare le riflessioni sul poema cavalleresco con il nuovo interesse per una nuova 'poesia heroica', fondata su un fatto vero, cioè storico, nel quale interviene però il verosimile, sotto forma di trascendente o soprannaturale. La nuova idea di poesia è esemplificata dal poemetto celebrativo in 50 stanze intitolato L'heroico – 'uno schizzo della vita heroica' (Gli heroici, p. 15) – intorno al quale si struttura il trattato. Il poemetto ha per soggetto la 'horribile caduta' del principe Alfonso durante una giostra a Blois nel 1556: 'il vero fu che il Principe cadesse a morte et non morisse […] et il verisimile è che gli Angeli custodi della sua vita incontinente si movessero, et che Marte principale tra essi li conducesse dinanzi a Dio, et parlasse per salute di esso Signore in modo tale che gli impetrasse la vita' (ibid., p. 12)" (S. Ritrovato, Nicolucci, Giovan Battista, in: "Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani", vol. 78, 2013, s.v.).
Bongi states that there are copies of the Heroici printed by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari on large paper and on blue paper, one of which was in the hands of "cav. Andrea Tessier di Venezia". The reference is to the library of the Venetian cavaliere Andrea Tessier (d. 1896), which was sold in Munich in 1900 by Jacques Rosenthal, and which contained a copy "tiré sur papier bleu" (Bibliothek Tessier. Katalog eins grossen Theils der Bibliotheken des verstorbenen Chevalier Andrea Tessier und des Marchese de***, lot 534). This copy may have been purchased by Count Raoul Chandon de Briailles and subsequently inherited by his son Henry, whose ex-libris is pasted on the flyleaf of the copy offered here. A blue-paper copy of Pigna's work was also sold in London in 1783, at the sale of the distinguished library collected by Thomas Croft: the catalogue Bibliotheca Croftsiana lists the entry "Pigna (Gio. Batt.) gli Heroici 4° perg. Vineg. per Gab. Giolito 1561. printed upon blue paper".
"In the second half of 1514, Aldine copies printed on blue paper and unusually large white paper (the so-called carta grande or reale) suddenly appeared on the market. The earliest known Aldine books on blue paper were part of the Scriptores rei rusticae in quarto dated May 1514 […] Giolito ostensibly followed Aldus's line some thirty years after the latter's death. By this time printing on parchment had probably become too expensive to deal with, even for a printer with ambitions and means such as Giolito. Among the handful of copies he did issue on parchment, two are from the first appearance of his best seller, a lavishly illustrated edition of Ariosto's Orlando furioso dated 1542. From the following year onwards,Giolito usually turned to blue paper, printing at least two copies the Furioso edition of 1543 and three for that of 1544. Such pattern was kept for many other of his publications for over two decades, until 1568. While it is possible that a handful of blue paper copies were presented to patrons, authors and prominent editors, the scale, frequency and consistency of most of these items suggest that they could only be meant for profit. This holds especially true for those which were part of the editions he routinely reprinted, such as Ariosto and Petrarch. Giolito must have gotten so used to producing a small part of his print-run in blue paper that he kept a considerable amount of this material in stock, roughly 1.2% of the whole value of his supply of white paper, as we learn from the firm's inventory dated 1550.As soon as we try to turn these data into an estimate of copies, something does not add up. When we apply the same ratio for all his output in the period 1543-1568 (790 editions) and even if we assume, overcautiously, that the two papers had the same unit cost and that the average print-run for each edition was around one thousand copies, Giolito would suddenly be credited with producing over nine thousand copies on blue paper. This is clearly too high a figure even for him, but it shows well to which extent he was able to improve and capitalised on what Aldus had started and ostensibly started trading in blue paper. Further hints that he also had a grip on the production chain of blue paper can be found in the same inventory: Giolito amassed an amount of the main dyer - woad -worth as much as 635.3 ducats, close to the value of his house furniture plus the printing machinery (661.7 ducats) and nearly three times the value of the rags he cared to stock (241.6 ducats)" (P. Sachet, In between Aldus and Giolito: Venetian imprints on blue paper (1514-1543), in: "Venice in blue", A. McCarthy, L. Moretti & P. Sachet, eds., Florence, 2024, pp. 133-134).
Giovanni Battista Nicolucci called Il Pigna was born in Ferrara, where he began his studies with Lilio Gregorio Giraldi and Battista Guarini. At the age of twenty he became a teacher at the 'Studio' in Ferrara and later secretary, chancellor and historiographer to Alfonso II d'Este. He was the author of Il duello (1554), the Romanzi (1554), a treatise on honour and the qualities of a gentleman, a history of the house of Este (1570), and an important treatise on stagecraft, Il Principe (1561), dedicated to duke Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, but originally written for Alfonso d'Este when he was a young prince (cf. R. Baldi, Giovan Battista Pigna: uno scrittore politico del Cinquecento, Genoa, 1983, passim).
Adams, P-1208; S. Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato stampatore in Venezia, Rome, 1895, II, p. 121; A. Nuovo-Ch. Coppens, I Giolito e la stampa nell'Italia del XVI secolo, Genève, 2005, p. 423; Edit 16, CNCE26327; Weinberg, op. cit., II, p. 1141. (Inventory #: 211)
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